People love Tombstone for many reasons, like Val Kilmer‘s magnetic performance as Doc Holliday, or the authenticity of (mostly) everyone’s mustache. But the biggest reason is how it leans into its own legendary status, using its pulp sense of fun and Robert Mitchum‘s opening narration to establish that this is a return to when Westerns were dime store fantasies and black hat vs white hat myths. Westerns have always lent themselves well to taking on dimensions that transcend their simple stories to touch on larger universal themes, and no storyteller did that better than Clint Eastwood. As both an actor and director, Eastwood had a mysterious quality that elevated his Western material to a higher plain, a quality that Roger Ebert recognized when describing his love for one of Eastwood’s best Westerns, Pale Rider.
What Is ‘Pale Rider’ About?
In the small town of Carbon Canyon, an evil mining baron named LaHood (Richard Dysart) rules over the town and uses his gang to persecute the local people so that they’ll leave. One young girl, Megan (Carrie Snodgrass), prays for a literal miracle, and right on schedule, a rider dressed like a preacher (Eastwood) arrives in town. He doesn’t have a proper name, so the townsfolk call him “Preacher,” and beseech him to help save them from LaHood and his gang. He tries to get them to accept money from LaHood to just leave, but they say no, leaving Preacher no choice but to stick around out of the goodness of his heart (though he’d never admit to that). The Preacher will see to it that justice is served with his two pistols, taking out any number of goons and corrupt lawmen that LaHood sends the town’s way, almost like a righteous avenging angel. He’s so effortless in his ability to dish out punishment that he almost doesn’t seem real, which Ebert honed in on in his four-star praise of the film.
Clint Eastwood Makes the Preacher a Complete Mystery in ‘Pale Rider’
As both an actor and director, Eastwood has long specialized in a less-is-more approach to his craft, building his persona around mystery and silence. His most infamous characters either withheld all of their background information, like the Man with No Name, or left the audience uncertain about what was actually true about them, like William Munny in Unforgiven. Ebert highlights how Eastwood’s “moods and silences are so well known that the slightest suggestion will do to convey an emotion,” usually amounting to a grimace or a bemused sneer.
With the Preacher, Eastwood frequently distances the audience from him, constantly shooting himself from afar, in shadow, with sunlight shining in the camera’s eye so you can’t make out his full appearance. Wrapped up in his signature maroon jacket, clerical collar, and top hat, the Preacher takes on a superheroic stature, swooping in at just the right moment to save those in need and modestly leaving with few people noticing, like a cowboy Batman. Many Eastwood characters could be called superheroes without the superpowers, but Pale Rider consistently grants the Preacher a mysterious aura of protection, as if fate was always on his side. Almost as if he… isn’t even human?
Clint Eastwood Viewed the Preacher as a Biblical Ghost
Ebert caught on to something very slick that Eastwood was intentionally sprinkling throughout the runtime: that the Preacher is actually a ghost. In Eastwood’s official biography, written by film critic Richard Schickel, he notes that, having previously played a potentially supernatural figure in High Plains Drifter, Eastwood is quoted as saying that he wanted the Preacher to be a “supernatural being or an emissary from a higher plane.” He felt like there was more to explore in that spooky playground and wanted to examine the Biblical implications of a man riding on a pale horse like Death itself. While we have no idea who he truly is or where he came from, he shows up immediately after a prayer for justice, and he comes in while the Book of Revelations passage about Death is being read out loud. He’s not a cliché ghost that has any of the visual cues we’re trained by ghost movies to expect, like phasing through walls or being surrounded by fog.
Related
“Do you have the guts to take a bullet, Frank?”
As Ebert puts it, Eastwood plays with the possibility that Preacher may be “something other than an ordinary mortal,” primarily through how he can seemingly defy the laws of physics to his advantage. LaHood’s gang can never get the drop on Preacher, as he changes his position during a fight in ways that are too good to be true. He can vanish from a chair in the time it takes his adversaries to enter a room, and Ebert highlights a confounding moment where the Preacher’s hand seems to appear from inside a water trough, even though it’s inexplicable how he got there. To be honest, such impossible feats sound like something Doc Holliday could do in his sleep, which is why you should watch one of Clint Eastwood’s best westerns and see a legend that Tombstone proudly stands in the shadow of.
Source link
