Some idle Clint Eastwood completism. Also a Carrie Snodgress jag from Rabbit, Run (1970). An anachronistic venture for the time: Eastwood directed a script by Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack — the same trio who made The Gauntlet (1977). Here Clint demonstrates what he did and did not learn or recall about Westerns from his work with Sergio Leone. His own performance is not great but the rest of the cast does OK.
It's Idaho in the latter half of the nineteenth century and everyone's mining alluvial gold in the snowy Sierra. An encampment gets overrun by some local ferals on the orders of town founder Richard Dysart. Clint turns up after the fact and proves his chops by bashing the bashers as a favour to bashee Michael Moriarty. All (that is, both of) the ladies go ga ga for Clint, especially when he pulls out the dog collar and adopts the persona of "preacher". We never see him preach except when he tells the people to stick together but goes alone himself (of course). There's some fancy shooting and an anticlimax.
The characters are annoyingly underdeveloped. For instance giant Richard Kiel seems to learn the moral aspects of violence from Clint but his main opportunity to demonstrate this is interrupted (by Clint). The negative space portraits, the dynamite, the awesome shooting are all twenty years stale; the best cinematography is of the distant mountains. There is no soundtrack. At best it's a dry run for Unforgiven (1992).
Roger Ebert: four stars. "One of the subtlest things in the movie is the way it plays with the possibility that Eastwood’s character may be a ghost, or at least something other than an ordinary mortal." Vincent Canby.
