High Plains Drifter (1973)

Like a lot of Westerns it begins with a lone stranger riding into a frontier town accompanied by wind and dust. In HPD the town is named Lago, which, in truth, is less of a town and more a collection of lonely buildings situated at the edge of nowhere. Fearing for their lives the residents of Lago ask the newcomer for aid and, for a price, the stranger obliges.
What's different about HPD is the offbeat tone that follows Clint as he sets things in motion. As we watch him prepare the cowardly townspeople, in essence helping them to help themselves, we're aware of a deeper motivation at work, one that ticks like clockwork just beneath the surface of the familiar setting, helped along by some occasional spaghetti influences. HPD gets overlooked by a lot of people in favour of Clint's more famous works, but it absolutely holds its own even when placed next to the best of them.

5 tits on a boar out of 5