USA,
1985, 115 min
Shown in 2001
CREDITS
- dir
-
Clint Eastwood
- prod
-
Clint Eastwood
- scr
-
Michael Butler, Dennis Shryack
- cam
-
Bruce Surtees
- editor
-
Joel Cox
- mus
-
Lennie Niehaus
- cast
-
Clint Eastwood, Michael Moriarty, Carrie Snodgress, Christopher Penn, Richard Dysart
- source
-
Warner Bros. Classics, 15821 Ventura Boulevard, Suite 525, Encino, CA 91436
-
COMMENTS
Clint Eastwood appeared in person to receive the Akira Kurosawa Award in 2001.
OTHER
After a decade of Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood returned to the Wild West with Pale Rider, a film that centered on the familiar character of the mysterious cowboy drifter. Is he a Biblical mirage? A man returning to settle an old score? We can guess, but as Eastwood fans know, answers don’t come easy. What we do know is that a small enclave of good-hearted miners in a serene Sierra canyon are being harassed by a nearby mining company whose owners employ gunmen as brutal as their company’s hydraulic mining techniques. The company is desperate to steal the miners’ claims, but they didn’t count on this man they call Preacher—nor did the teenage daughter (Sydney Penny) of the family he befriends. If the story sounds a little familiar, it’s because Pale Rider is an homage to Shane, with Eastwood’s Preacher standing in for Alan Ladd and Penny playing the Brandon de Wilde role. Eastwood’s film has a spiritual undertone, but it’s also profoundly aware of the land itself—the wintry mountains surrounding the mining camp give it the feeling of a lost Shangri-La, though hell, and the company's violent hydraulic system, is just around the bend. With Pale Rider, Eastwood reminds us that Westerns are not just genre pictures but stories of timeless significance and beauty.
—Kurt Wolff
FACTOID #219
Daniel Talbot, editor of Film: An Anthology , was the first recipient of the Mel Novikoff Award in 1988. Later he cofounded New Yorker Films, a distribution company that introduced many foreign language films to North American audiences. The Mel Novikoff Award, named after the pioneering San Francisco exhibitor, is given to an individual or institution whose work has enhanced the filmgoing public’s knowledge and appreciation of world cinema.
