A small community of tin-panners laboring in Gold Rush-era California is in constant threat of being rousted from their claims by a grasping mining baron (Richard Dysart), who aspires to plumb the land for himself. And I think you can say all these things in the Western, in the classic mythological form.'Īs developed by Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack, Eastwood's scenarists on The Gauntlet (1977), Pale Rider became a compelling concoction owing obvious debts to Shane (1953) and Eastwood's star-making efforts for Sergio Leone. You can still talk about sweat and hard work, about the spirit, about love for the land and ecology. Anyway, aren't the Star Wars movies Westerns transposed into space?'Įastwood opined to Henry that the Hollywood Western had gone stale by the '60s 'probably because the great directors - Anthony Mann, Raoul Walsh, John Ford - were no longer working a lot.' With the spaghetti Western cycle that had made him a global superstar having run its course, Eastwood found it time 'to analyze the classic Western. As he declared in 1984 to Michael Henry in Clint Eastwood: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi), 'It's not possible that The Outlaw Josey Wales could be the last Western to have been a commercial success. Over his career, Eastwood had known nothing but success with oaters, and he went into the production of Pale Rider regarding the project as a safe gamble. Once the notoriously disastrous Heaven's Gate (1980) had made its title synonymous with wretched excess, the major studios wanted nothing to do with sagebrush sagas, and few if any similar projects that could be regarded as significant emerged in theaters through the mid-'80s. Memorable scenes include Clint taking on four of LaHood’s men with a piece of hickory and miner Spider finding out just how deadly Stockburn and his deputies can be when taunted.Much like his allegorical protagonist did for the oppressed prospectors of Pale Rider (1985), director/star Clint Eastwood rode to the rescue when the Hollywood Western genre was at its lowest ebb.

Then, of course, The Preacher shows up.īut all in all, it makes for a highly entertaining, well-acted Western at a time when those were few and far between. Then there’s a silly scene in which LaHood’s henchmen storm into a cafe where The Preacher is having a cup of coffee and start emptying their gun barrells into nothing. Or a main adversary who swore he was killed before.Ī bit jarring is the fact that both woman in miner Hull Barrett’s wife - Sarah Wheeler and her young daughter Megan - wind up batting eyes at the preacher. Of course, Shane didn’t have bullet scars all over his back. This marked Eastwood’s only Western of the 1980s and the return of the mysterious stranger we met in “Fistful of Dollars” and that he brought back in “High Plains Drifter.”īut the plot - right down to the final scene - is more reminiscent of “Shane” as the stranger helps pull together a band of settlers under the thumb of a more powerful man, then winds up taking the law into his own hands. Sydney Penny as Megan Wheeler, a young girl about to ride into trouble in Pale Rider (1985) And he comes complete with a band of six killers for deputies. When four or five of LaHood’s ruffians try to rough up Hull Barrett (Michael Moriarty), The Preacher whips them all with a stick of hickory.Īnd when Coy’s son Josh (Chris Penn) sics the hulking Club on the Preacher, he whips him too.īut LaHood has an ace up his sleeve - a lawman named Stockburn (John Russell) who sells his law to the highest bidder. And on its back rides a man who becomes known as The Preacher because of the preacher’s collar around his neck.īut it soon becomes apparent this is no ordinary preacher. While burying her pet, she prays for a miracle.īehold, a pale horse appears.

Megan Wheeler (Sydney Penny), a pretty 14-year-old, watched her pet dog gunned down in the raid. His last raid has wrecked the camp of the “tin pans” - his derisive nicknam for the small band - and nearly broken their spirits. A small group of miners have set up camp in Carbon Canyon with their families, hoping to find gold.īut local land baron Coy LaHood (Richard Dysart) wants the canyon for his own and can’t move in his hydraulic mining operation until the miners leave.

Pale rider cast 1985