High Plains Drifter

Clint Eastwood directs his first western with enough style to suggest that he stayed awake during his Sergio Leone masterclasses back in the Sixties.

A stranger rides into a desert town and kills three gunmen in self-defence. Holed up in a hotel room, he is visited by the town's elders, who beg him to defend the place from a trio of escaped convicts who have sworn to destroy it. The stranger agrees, but on his own unconventional terms.

Always watchable, this mystical post-spaghetti western is given an extra edge by what is definitely the meanest rendering of any of Eastwood's man-with-no-name characters.

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