PALE RIDER

After the catastrophic failure of 'Heaven's Gate' in 1980, it was a brave move by Clint Eastwood to produce, direct and star in another Western a few years later.  He was rewarded with a commercial and critical hit, although I'm at a bit of a loss to explain its success.  

I agree with the critic quoted in Wikipedia who thought it was derivative, given that it has very strong echoes of both 'Shane' and Eastwood's own 'High Plains Drifter' - the basic story is of a community under threat which is saved by a mysterious outsider, who may well be a ghost.

When you are referencing two such strong films you need to bring something distinctive to the table but this is where 'Pale Rider' falls short.

Sure there are some variations.  

Instead of a young lad who idolises Shane we get a teenage girl, Megan, who would quite like to lose her virginity to the stranger.

Instead of farmers, the community at risk consists of a bunch of gold prospectors and their families who are occupying a canyon which rich mining baron Mr LaHood would like to acquire because his gold mines are running dry.

But these are small changes, not for the better. 

Some religious elements are also thrown in.  

The 'Pale Rider' refers to the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse, who represents Death;  just to ram home this point Megan is reading the relevant part of the Bible when Clint first appears: "And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name was Death, and Hell followed with him."

Later Clint's character, for no very good reason, wears a dog collar, and throughout he is simply known as 'The Preacher', but thankfully he removes the dog collar before the final shootout.

One of the strengths of 'Shane' is the beautifully understated relationship between Shane and Jean Arthur's character , whereas here the relationship between The Preacher and Megan's mother Sarah is thinly sketched even though they do get to spend a night together (Sarah is not married).

In fact one of the problems with this film is that very little is fleshed out satisfactorily.  LaHood has a son who has his eye on young Megan, but this comes to nothing much other than a rather contrived and ugly scene where he tries to rape her.

At one stage LaHood, at The Preacher's suggestion, offers a large sum of money to the community for them to skedaddle.  They rather foolishly (in my opinion) turn the offer down because compared with the farmers in 'Shane' their 'community' hardly seems worth fighting for; it’s just a mining camp. 

Eastwood tries to give the story a modern spin by imbuing the camp with a hippie vibe and having LaHood use environmentally unfriendly mining techniques, but it just adds to the muddle.

Bizarrely Richard Kiel (best known as Jaws in 'The Spy Who Loved Me') is here as one of LaHood's employees who initially appears to be a bad guy but who later (again for no very good reason) helps The Preacher.

Anyway, he's not the main villain.  This is Marshal Stokburn.  He's nowhere near as impressive as Jack Palance's character in 'Shane' so he has to have no less than six deputies to back him up.  The scene where they shoot dead one of the prospectors is a pale imitation of the iconic scene in 'Shane' where Palance's character kills Elisha Cook Jr's character.

It's clear by the end of the film that The Preacher is the ghost of someone who Stokburn killed in the past but since we don't learn anything about this it's hard to get that interested in what frankly is a gimmick to spice up an otherwise rather dull story.  

Appropriately the final shootout is quite lame.