High Plains Drifter marked the first time Eastwood directed a western. Keeping in line with the work he put in on his spaghetti westerns, the movie is a darker, grittier style western, as opposed to the type of film made prior to them. To illustrate that the Stranger he’s playing is a bad dude, Eastwood has the character kill three bar-room bullies and then rape a woman in the first fifteen minutes of the film.

This is not someone I want to root for. In fact, Eastwood makes sure his character, simply known as The Stranger is pretty despicable and unlikeable from the get-go. He learns that the men he killed were hired by the town to protect them from three newly released from prison outlaws, including Stacey (Geoffrey Lewis) and Cole (Anthony James), who are coming back to wreak vengeance on the town for a whipping death.

He agrees to help out the town only if they acquiesce to all his demands. Consequently, he starts ruining the town, and the residents which include characters played by John Hillerman, Billy Curtis and Mitchell Ryan, taking liberties with all aspects of the small town and its residents.

He’s cold, and callous, and he’s arrived in town with a mission. And it seems that a lot is going on here, and that he may know something about the whipping as well.

Eastwood crafts a tautly-paced tale, where absolutely none of the characters are likable or have any redeeming qualities, and yet, you can’t stop watching. In fact, this may be the first time that I’ve seen Eastwood in a role where I didn’t find anything about the character enjoyable, except maybe the cool costume.

It’s a rough and brutal watch, the violence is front and foremost, and the Stranger is almost as brutal and unforgiving as the trio of outlaws he’s supposed to be protecting the town from. I knew in that first fifteen minutes, that this was going to be a tough watch; the way all the characters except for Sarah Belding (Verna Bloom), the victim, let the subject of the rape just pass by.

There are some tough moments to get through, and the vengeance that is wreaked on the town is deserved, but the Stranger is just as vile, no matter what events shaped him.

Eastwood as a director shows that he can easily handle the genre he is most popular for as an actor, and it definitely makes me want to revisit Unforgiven at some point in the very near future.