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| Clint Eastwood, Verna Bloom, Marianna
Hill, Mitch Ryan, Jack Ging |
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Anamorphic
widescreen |
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Dolby Digital
5.1 |
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DTS |
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Trailer(s) |
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Featurette(s) |
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Documentary |
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Audio commentary
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Deleted scenes
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Concept art
/ storyboards |
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Multi-angle
feature |
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Mordecai
(Billy Curtis): What did you say your name was?
The Stranger (Clint Eastwood): I didn't.
A
mysterious stranger arrives in a town that lives in fear as it covers
up a secret.
The
second film directed by Clint Eastwood (after the thriller Play Misty
for Me) is a competent Western very much in the vein of the Sergio
Leone-directed 'spaghetti westerns' that first made him a star. His
unnamed drifter is a slightly darker figure here, a kind of mythical
avenging angel come to visit a town with a guilty conscience. Eastwood
also goes for more of a sense of realism here, losing Leone's extreme
camera angles and the ironic asides that made the violence in the earlier
films easier to handle. High Plains Drifter is therefore sometimes
rather heavy going, though Eastwood deserves praise for attempting a
more serious type of Western rather than the humorous vignettes of The
Good, the Bad and the Ugly. This path ultimately led him to his
masterpiece Unforgiven, and though High Plains Drifter
is a much less accomplished work, it is a solid if overly nasty effort
(with rather questionable sexual politics) with at least a couple of
exceptional sequences. |
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The
only difference between the releases for Region 1 and Region 2 is that
the R2 edition has an anamorphic widescreen transfer, which the R1 version
does not.
The
anamorphic widescreen image is framed at an aspect ratio of approx.
2.35:1. The daylight exteriors look very good, with sharp, bright colors
and good detail. Most of the nighttime scenes and interiors however
suffer from poorly defined black levels and a general softness that
detracts from the image.
The monaural sound mix is presented in Dolby Digital 2.0. The soundtrack
has a very limited presence, with muted sound effects and poor dynamics,
but good intelligible dialogues.
The
pan&scan theatrical trailer is the only extra apart from
some limited production notes.The
static menu screens are very simply designed using a Western-style motif
similar to that on the box.
Dan
Hassler-Forest
Reviewed: 2001
Click
here for IMDB info on High
Plains Drifter.
Click here
to return to the front page.
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