Article theme: Sinnerman - 16 Horsepower
Clint Eastwood might have put the western out of its misery with Unforgiven, but first he gave it a more dignified sendoff with 1985's Pale Rider, a distillation of the thematic and archetypal core of the genre that leans into and loves the mythic side of it that Unforgiven would less interestingly repudiate.
![]() |
Because Eastwood rarely bothered much with lighting for his exteriors, his face is often in shadow as he rides around, making him even more like Death on his horse. |
Pale Rider is largely a retread of Shane and borrows moments from that film so brazenly we say "go for it", out loud to our PC monitors (you don't still have a TV set, right?). It also nods to Once Upon a Time in the West (the one that got away for Eastwood, who was the first choice for Bronson's role), in these guys' uniform dusters:
![]() |
>tfw no friends to walk around with dressed like this :((( |
No doubt a bigger western NERD could point out other little homages, but Pale Rider is also somewhat of a spiritual sequel to Eastwood's own High Plains Drifter. With his characteristically gritty, naturalistic style of filming, Eastwood might seem an unlikely candidate to delve into /x/ territory, but it's evident that Drifter's flirtation with the supernatural stuck with him. Both films concern a mysterious stranger coming to dispense terrible justice in a town afflicted by greed, corruption and sin, who may or may not be a ghost. In Drifter, Eastwood's stranger befriended a dwarf and made him mayor of the town; in Rider, his Preacher faces off with a giant (Richard Kiel, The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker), evoking David Lunch's giant and dwarf casting in Twin Peaks in a subtle thematic pairing of the two films and a hint of kinship between the ghostly strangers and people verging on the look of fairytale beings.
![]() |
This is the look I give manlets too. Not heightist, just don't like 'em. |
With its red town and dream flashback sequences, High Plains Drifter is more overtly, garishly surreal, but it's the very subtlety of Pale Rider that makes it so unsettling and atmospheric, to say nothing of its brooding S-tier score. Moreover, Drifter caricatures its bad townsfolk, while Rider skewers a very real type of scumbag in its LaHood (Richard Dysart):
LaHood embodies the selfish boomercon businessman devoid of noblesse oblige, who sees his own people as kulaks in the way of line going up on chart. Preacher's righteous renunciation of his slimy materialism is invoked and catalysed by a young girl's prayer. LaHood's dark interiors contrast with the snow-white mountaintops whence Preacher rides. When his work is done, he rides back off into the white, perhaps until the next time, when the trumpets sound.