''Pale Rider'' is not the equal of ''The Outlaw Josey Wales.'' That the hero of the new movie really is a god of some sort eliminates a certain amount of suspense. There are laughs in it, and all but one or two of them are intentional, including a final, shameless quote from George Stevens's ''Shane.'' Eastwood's self-directed films as of the Eastwood films directed by Don Siegel. Eastwood's ''Gauntlet'' and Chuck Norris's ''Code of Silence,'' is a Western played absolutely straight, but it's also very funny in a dryly sophisticated way that - it's only now apparent - has been as true of Mr.
''Pale Rider, written by Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack, who also wrote Mr. The difficulty is in bringing it off, which is where Mr. It doesn't take particular inventiveness for an actor-director to cast himself as God, or even as His Son. Resurrection also is the key to ''Pale Rider.'' However, just who this fellow was in his previous incarnation is left so vague you have a right to suspect that he might have been Him. That earlier Stranger was an implacable gun slinger, eventually revealed to be the ghost of a high-principled sheriff, returned to earth to wreak revenge on the Mammon-worshipping townspeople who had lynched him. Eastwood's earlier ''High Plains Drifter'' (1973), which he also directed and in which he played another character called the Stranger. ''Pale Rider,'' which opens today at the Warner Twin and other theaters, recalls the curious metaphysics of Mr.
Eastwood may have been improving over the years, it's also taken all these years for most of us to recognize his very consistent grace and wit as a film maker.
This veteran movie icon handles both jobs with such intelligence and facility I'm just now beginning to realize that, though Mr. Eastwood, who not only stars in ''Pale Rider'' but also directed it. He is, of course, the Stranger, played by Mr. As Megan pronounces ''Amen,'' the camera cuts to another part of the West, to the figure of a lone horseman astride a fine, pale horse, riding easily but with inexorable purpose toward Carbon Valley.
0 kommentar(er)
