And I looked, and behold a pale horse and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.
Revelation 6:8
. Pale Rider is either a remake of Shane or Eastwood’s homage to it. Either way, it’s superb. Actually, I think in some ways it’s rather better than Shane (heresy, I know but there we are). It’s as visually stunning as the 1953 picture (Bruce Surtees, a genius behind the lens, doing a Loyal Griggs, even if unOscared) but Clint as the lone gunfighter riding in is ten times better than soft Alan Ladd, the baddies are nastier, the honest folk that the gunfighter protects are more convincing and the kid is older, does not whine and is a girl.
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The rider with no name
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Along with Silverado, the movie came out after half a decade of Western drought caused by the Titanic-like Heaven’s Gate, which nearly sank the Western genre single-handed as studios shied from producing another huge loss-maker. We should be eternally grateful to Mr Eastwood for doing that.
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The pale horse
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In some ways the movie is another chapter in the long Western history of the man with no name. Even in the Dollars films Clint was riding into town, shooting a few bad guys and riding out. He did it a lot – think of High Plains Drifter, for example. Here he is again, older and grayer to be sure but still ridin’ in, rightin’ the wrongs and ridin’ off into the sunset. Pretty much in the same costume, too. And we still don’t know his name. The German title to the movie was Pale Rider: Der Namenlose Reiter. Maybe, like me, Eastwood spent a lot of his childhood watching The Lone Ranger and it got in his blood..
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And of course there are seven
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In some ways the movie is therefore a very traditional Western. There is a town ‘owned’ by a rich fellow in league with a crooked banker and with a bought-and-paid-for marshal. A stranger rides in and takes the side of the honest but exploited folk. You’ve seen it in Shane, Open Range, oh, any number of times. William S Hart was doing it back in the silent days. This puts us in the Western comfort zone and adds main-street-cred to the movie.
And of course it is full of Shane references, such as the attack on the giant rock, standing in for Van Heflin’s tree stump.
But in other ways Pale Rider is original and different.
The movie has an ecological tinge. The bad guys are raping the land by using high-pressure hydraulic mining techniques, whereas the good guys are seeking gold in a more eco-friendly manner.
There are religious overtones (or are they undertones? I never quite know the difference). The gunfighter turns out to be a preacher. He arrives on the day the girl has asked God (“if You exist”) for “just one miracle”. But the preacher has a short way with gunmen and when he says grace suggests that “for what we are about to receive may we be truly grateful”: the Lord doesn’t even get a mention.
The Preacher is often backlit, hard to see or with his face in shadow. It all heightens the mysteriousness of the nameless stranger.
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Shadow
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The acting and casting are very good. Eastwood is magnificent and there isn’t a bad actor in the film. We might single out for praise Carrie Snodgress and Sydney Penny as the mother and daughter who fall for the stranger, Doug McGrath in the Elisha Cook Jr part as the fellow shot down by the gunman and especially John Russell as Stockburn, the leader of the killers (there are the mystic Western number seven of them, of course) who is brilliant as the ruthless gunman in the Lee van Cleef tradition. And we thought Jack Palance was good!
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Stockburn
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I was pleased to see Fran Ryan in the role of Ma Blankenship: she was the best Mrs Samuel (Jesse James’s mother) ever.
Writers Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack were far from Western experts (Butler had never done one) but the screenplay was good enough to win them a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America.
If I have a criticism (and I guess I am a critic really so maybe I can have one) I would say that the Preacher is too proficient. You never really think that he might not eliminate all the gunmen. I’m not saying he ought to have been like the bumbling amateur but lucky sheriff in Firecreek or McCabe up there in the cold country getting the bad guys more by luck than skill. I just think if he hadn’t been quite such a superman it would have heightened the tension. But then one notion is that the Preacher is a ghost, a sort of avenging spirit. Stockburn had seen him die. He is the pale rider whose name is death and Hell follows with him.
I might also add (OK, I know that’s two criticisms) that the sexual tension was weakened rather than the reverse by the Preacher sleeping with Sarah. In Shane, the attraction of Shane to Marian (and vice-versa) is very powerful but always lies under the surface, unstated and unacted upon. But then that was 1953.
The Sawtooth National Recreation Area in Idaho made a stunning location. Visually, this film is wonderful – the equal of Shane. I think it’s the best Eastwood Western apart from Unforgiven, better even than Josey Wales.
Watched this again recently and really enjoyed it. The scenery is stunning, the acting good, and the story interesting. Your review is spot on as it is an excellent western, another winner from Eastwood.
Yes, another winner. Once he left behind Rawhide on TV and those spaghettis, Eastwood made some very good Westerns. They weren’t all excellent but in my view, just for Josey Wales, Pale Rider and Unforgiven Clint deserves a place in the Western pantheon.
There is much good in PR, but I can’t say it’s a film I relish watching. Somehow the entire atmosphere strikes me as oppressively gloomy. Perhaps it’s the cloudcover or the high mountains pressing in from all sides. Or maybe it’s the marauders shooting the girl’s dog at the beginning of the film. Then too the near-rape scene is highly unpleasant. I will certainly watch this movie and have done so several times, but consider it something of a grim undertaking.
But, as Jim has noted, there’s much to admire here. It’s got Clint and that pretty much makes it an automatic winner in my book. And incidentally, the top hat he wears in PR may be just about my favorite accessory item in any Western. I wouldn’t mind owning a replica, but would look mighty eccentric wearing it. Might do so anyway.
And there’s the great John Russell as Marshall Stockburn. I believe he was in his early sixties when the film was made, but was probably the handsomest Western actor I’ve ever seen. We should all age so well. And I’m straight as an arrow, incidentally.
I also love the long dusters Stockburn and his six deputies wear. They lend a sort of sartorial formality.
So, in a certain sense, PR is aesthetically splendid, and as something of an aesthete, that matters a great deal to me.
Ultimately, of course, PR is a mashup of Shane and High Plains Drifter. The plot, although embellished and altered, is basically lifted from Shane. And Clint’s character, some sort of otherworldy spirit possessing very physical properties, is the cinematic ghost of his character from HPD. It’s passing odd that Eastwood, an avowed atheist, often imbues his films with overtly supernatural and mystical characteristics. I detect a touch of agnosticism in Clint’s atheism.
My favourite of Eastwood’s Westerns as director. Shane is my favourite film of all time but I don’t really respond to PR as a Shane remake primarily but in its own right as a well constructed, shot and acted, and in some ways quite classical Western- but with mystical overtones
What else to say…!? A splendid film, visually attractive (thanks to the great Bruce Surtees, so familiar with the western world and Eastwood AND gorgeous Idaho setting) and thematically rich, strewn with multiple references and homages.
The cavalcade introduction makes me think of Forty Guns for instance, also several Leone’s scenes and props (the guns especially Eastwood’s revolvers, the dusters of the Malevolent/Maleficent Seven hence an other homage to Sturges), Shane of course, a kind of modern version of Stevens’ film with more contemporary hints such as the mother/daughter/rider (or preacher…) relationships and, as said by Jeff, ecology.
It is probably the only western to show hydraulic mining. In the Sierra Nevada foothills not far from Nevada City (in California…),
Malakoff Diggins State Historic Park is preserving of the largest sites of this way of mining gold in the 1880s. A very special place just missing the preacher when I visited it…
The main if not only major criticism I would have towards the film is the Richard Kiel role (as Club) as it brings a rather out of the blue comical touch (OK Kiel prevents Chris Penn to shoot Eastwood in the back but they could have found an other solution).
Maybe it is Eastwood’s homage to Ted Cassidy/Paul Newman “fight” in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid ?!
Quite the coincidence, J-M. Watched this night before last, myself. Not much to add to my earlier remarks except to say I really like Fran Ryan as Ma Blankenship. I’ve long thought she was a natural for a western gal. And also, even though Eastwood is 55 in this film, he looks even tougher than he did at the age of 35 in For a Few Dollars More. He’s now 95, by the way.
Vera Miles is just about 2 months younger than Eastwood and Robert Duvall is not far behind them. But all are behind Mel Brooks (in his hundredth year) who has his rightful place here with his Blazing Saddles …
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Watched this again recently and really enjoyed it. The scenery is stunning, the acting good, and the story interesting. Your review is spot on as it is an excellent western, another winner from Eastwood.
Yes, another winner. Once he left behind Rawhide on TV and those spaghettis, Eastwood made some very good Westerns. They weren’t all excellent but in my view, just for Josey Wales, Pale Rider and Unforgiven Clint deserves a place in the Western pantheon.
There is much good in PR, but I can’t say it’s a film I relish watching. Somehow the entire atmosphere strikes me as oppressively gloomy. Perhaps it’s the cloudcover or the high mountains pressing in from all sides. Or maybe it’s the marauders shooting the girl’s dog at the beginning of the film. Then too the near-rape scene is highly unpleasant. I will certainly watch this movie and have done so several times, but consider it something of a grim undertaking.
But, as Jim has noted, there’s much to admire here. It’s got Clint and that pretty much makes it an automatic winner in my book. And incidentally, the top hat he wears in PR may be just about my favorite accessory item in any Western. I wouldn’t mind owning a replica, but would look mighty eccentric wearing it. Might do so anyway.
And there’s the great John Russell as Marshall Stockburn. I believe he was in his early sixties when the film was made, but was probably the handsomest Western actor I’ve ever seen. We should all age so well. And I’m straight as an arrow, incidentally.
I also love the long dusters Stockburn and his six deputies wear. They lend a sort of sartorial formality.
So, in a certain sense, PR is aesthetically splendid, and as something of an aesthete, that matters a great deal to me.
Ultimately, of course, PR is a mashup of Shane and High Plains Drifter. The plot, although embellished and altered, is basically lifted from Shane. And Clint’s character, some sort of otherworldy spirit possessing very physical properties, is the cinematic ghost of his character from HPD. It’s passing odd that Eastwood, an avowed atheist, often imbues his films with overtly supernatural and mystical characteristics. I detect a touch of agnosticism in Clint’s atheism.
My favourite of Eastwood’s Westerns as director. Shane is my favourite film of all time but I don’t really respond to PR as a Shane remake primarily but in its own right as a well constructed, shot and acted, and in some ways quite classical Western- but with mystical overtones
A comparison/contrast of PR and Shane might be a good article idea for you.
Hmm good thinking, I might just do that one of these days!
I always wondered if the dusters were Clint’s homage to Leone.
What else to say…!? A splendid film, visually attractive (thanks to the great Bruce Surtees, so familiar with the western world and Eastwood AND gorgeous Idaho setting) and thematically rich, strewn with multiple references and homages.
The cavalcade introduction makes me think of Forty Guns for instance, also several Leone’s scenes and props (the guns especially Eastwood’s revolvers, the dusters of the Malevolent/Maleficent Seven hence an other homage to Sturges), Shane of course, a kind of modern version of Stevens’ film with more contemporary hints such as the mother/daughter/rider (or preacher…) relationships and, as said by Jeff, ecology.
It is probably the only western to show hydraulic mining. In the Sierra Nevada foothills not far from Nevada City (in California…),
Malakoff Diggins State Historic Park is preserving of the largest sites of this way of mining gold in the 1880s. A very special place just missing the preacher when I visited it…
The main if not only major criticism I would have towards the film is the Richard Kiel role (as Club) as it brings a rather out of the blue comical touch (OK Kiel prevents Chris Penn to shoot Eastwood in the back but they could have found an other solution).
Maybe it is Eastwood’s homage to Ted Cassidy/Paul Newman “fight” in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid ?!
Quite the coincidence, J-M. Watched this night before last, myself. Not much to add to my earlier remarks except to say I really like Fran Ryan as Ma Blankenship. I’ve long thought she was a natural for a western gal. And also, even though Eastwood is 55 in this film, he looks even tougher than he did at the age of 35 in For a Few Dollars More. He’s now 95, by the way.
Vera Miles is just about 2 months younger than Eastwood and Robert Duvall is not far behind them. But all are behind Mel Brooks (in his hundredth year) who has his rightful place here with his Blazing Saddles …
PR is packed with a lot of good actors sometimes appearing very briefly.
I like the very well lit miners’ talks at the campfire at night.