Pale Rider (1985)
Western directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. And boy, can you tell.
A small settlement of gold prospectors is threatened by an evil mining magnate for their land. Just as it seems like they're forced to abandon their home, a mysterious preacher comes into town, offering them his help. Also, he can almost single handedly take out six armed men and every woman falls in love with him upon laying eyes on him. Like I said. You can tell.
Okay, but no, let's assume the best of Eastwood and take a moment to think about what he was actually trying to do here. Clearly, he's playing a variation of his "Man with no name" from Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy. Pale Rider was made in the mid 80's, at a time when westerns had mostly stopped being popular and the last time they had been popular, it was the more critical, more deconstructive variety made by the likes of Leone, Corbucci and Peckinpah. Pale Rider is very explicitly not that. It's clearly an attempt to reintegrate the visual and stylistic trappings of the deconstructive western back into a classical western narrative.
Which isn't to say that it isn't still essentially a self insert Gary Stu fanfiction of Clint Eastwood heroically saving a community from a predatory businessman like some sort of avenging angel, securing their love and adoration (while selflessly rejecting the women's advances) and riding off into the sunset. The 80's really were a period when humility was a sin, weren't they?
It's not that I think Pale Rider isn't good, of course. I'd say it's very solid, in fact. It's got just about everything one would expect from a solid Western. Well choreographed gunfights, a story about rugged self determination triumphing over the forces of big business and some breathtaking scenery. The movie is set in Northern California, though I don't know where it was actually filmed. But I do gotta say, those were some lovely mountain vistas they shot. Eastwood's overall approach to directing a western is a bit more cool, a bit less tense than that of Leone, delivering something considerably less cynical and more romantic.
Contextualized within the general evolution of the western movie it represents the return to the grander archetypes that doesn't contradict but rather seek to transcend criticism. It's kind of a consistent pattern with genre fiction, where sincerity gets reinterpreted as naivety, ushering in cynicism, which in turn paves the way for a more mature, more self aware form of sincerity. Pale Rider seems generally aware that it's rooted in its own genres cliches and telling more of a broad, archetypal story than a realistic one but I think it does that fairly effectively.
While there is an unmistakable element of vanity to the way Eastwood chose to direct himself in Pale Rider, I think it's still an enjoyable movie that works as a love letter to its own genre. I don't think it's anywhere near Eastwoods best work, but it's a pretty decent movie.
