USA,
1972, 105 min
Shown in 2001
CREDITS
- dir
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Clint Eastwood
- prod
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Robert Daley
- scr
-
Ernest Tidyman
- cam
-
Bruce Surtees
- editor
-
Ferris Webster
- mus
-
Dee Barton
- cast
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Clint Eastwood, Verna Bloom, Marianna Hill, Billy Curtis, Geoffrey Lewis
- source
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Universal Studios, 100 Universal City Plaza, Universal City, CA 91608. FAX: 818-866-1498
-
COMMENTS
This screening was preceded by a clips program of career highlights and a live onstage interview with Clint Eastwood as recipient of the Akira Kurosawa Award.
OTHER
Dressed in black and carrying few belongings, a stranger emerges out of a dusty, scorched landscape and rides into Lago, a small Western mining town nestled alongside a bright blue desert lake. But of course this is no ordinary horseman, and his appearance here is hardly coincidental. The sweaty brows and shell-shocked expressions of the townsfolk tell us there are secrets aplenty in Lago, and it doesn’t take long for the veil to lift and the truth (and a good deal of blood) to spill. At first it’s just a few surly gunmen who wind up dead, but before long buildings are ruined, relationships ripped apart and townspeople are at each others’ throats. Humorous moments—the town runt being named sheriff and mayor—soon give way to unrelenting chaos, and sleepy lakeside Lago finds itself literally painted red. Carrying touches of mystery and intrigue picked up during his Sergio Leone days—the eerie soundtrack, the desolate desert landscapes and the silent, piercing strength of the eyes of the Man with No Name—Eastwood updates the genre with a complex mixture of the surreal and the savage. It’s an unsettling film, but it’s also a fascinating study of human nature.
—Kurt Wolff
FACTOID #123
San Francisco native Mervyn LeRoy, director of the Hollywood classics Little Caesar and Goldiggers of 1933, was honored with the Festival’s first tribute October 22, 1965.
