Who are you? the dwarf Mordecai (Billy Curtis) asks Clint Eastwoods Stranger at the end of Eastwoods 1973 western High Plains Drifter. You know, he replies, before vanishing into the desert heat waves near Californias Mono Lake. Adapting the amorally enigmatic and violent Man With No Name persona from his films with Sergio Leone, Eastwoods second film as director begins as his drifter emerges from that heat haze and rides into the odd lakefront settlement of Lago. Lagos residents are not particularly friendly, but once the Stranger shows his skills as a gunfighter, they beg him to defend them against a group of outlaws (led by Eastwood regular Geoffrey Lewis) who have a score to settle with the town. He agrees to train them in self-defense, but Mordecai and innkeepers wife Sarah Belding (Verna Bloom) soon suspect that the Stranger has another, more personal agenda. By the time the Stranger makes the corrupt community paint their town red and re-name it Hell, it is clear that he is not just another gunslinger. With its fragmented flashbacks and bizarre, austere locations, High Plains Drifters stylistic eccentricity lends an air of unsettling eeriness to its revenge story, adding an uncanny slant to Eastwoods antiheroic westerner. Seminal western hero John Wayne was so offended by Eastwoods harshly revisionist view of a frontier town that he wrote to Eastwood, objecting that this was not what the spirit of the West was all about. Eastwoods audience, however, was not so put off, and an exhibitors poll named Eastwood a top box-office draw for 1973. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide