Pale Rider on France 3: a simple, stripped-down, pure western (review)

Clint Eastwood returns to television this Monday evening.

At 9:10 p.m., France 3 will honor one of the masters of the western, Clint Eastwoodwith the diffusion of Pale Ridera 1985 film in which he played the dual role of director and lead actor, rediscovering here his taste for enigmatic and nameless characters, like those he played at the time for Sergio Leone in his Dollar Trilogy.

The Pale Rider Story : The last independent gold prospectors of LaHood, a mining town in California, are harassed by the gang of Coy LaHood, founder of the town, who wants to take over their concession. At the moment when the peaceful miners are ready to give up the fight, a lone horseman dressed all in black emerges from the mountain. No one knows his name, his past, his origins. Hull Barret, long opposed to Coy LaHood, welcomes him under his roof. It won’t be long before the man proves his shooting skills.

A western with many religious and philosophical echoes, Pale Rider was a big popular success upon its release, raising nearly $50 million, which made it the most profitable western of the 1980s. Extremely well received for the depth of its themes, Pale Rider also received the honor of an official selection in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. On the occasion of its broadcast this evening, here is his review, published in our top Clint Eastwood, of which he obtained 8th place.

“Less cynical and powerful than The Man of the High Plains. Less definitive than Merciless. Less elegiac than Josey Wales. Of his four westerns, Pale Rider is the most fragile. Not minor, but simple, stripped down. Pure. The title takes up a verse from the Apocalypse (“I looked, and there appeared a horse of a pale color. He who rode him was called death, and hell accompanied him”) and Pale Rider is indeed of a biblical or Zen austerity (with a stick fight). Yet the real matrix is not Kurosawa, but Shane. Same shift in point of view (the story is taken care of by the eyes of a teenager) same absence of “hero. All that remains here is poverty, misery and death.”

Clint Eastwood, 93, has a banana on the set of his latest film