First of all I do not accept at face value the assertion that the OP is a "big" Eastwood fan. Or maybe a fan of his but not is westerns? Point being I have a hard time seeing how this film is categorically different in some deficient way from his other westerns.
And then the presumption to assume those who like it do so out of some "nostalgia" for what? that it is "too old"? What the F does too old mean here? Obviously the OP is talking about his own pov rather than others.
The funny thing is at the time, and rightly still so, HPD was and is viewed as in the category of revisionist westerns, and HARDLY is nostalgic about the time period and historical circumstances in which the film is set. As such the OP cannot possibly be making any sense in saying the film is nostalgic in that regard.
So instead it is supposedly nostalgic for what? An early seventies revisionist western? I have a hard time making sense of that sort of assertion.
As for the reference to what effectively is the middle third of the film, between the if you will reaching agreement on the deal with the nameless stranger and the last third, when Bridges and partners get out of jail, to "preparations", the OP has entirely missed the point. This in fact is where the main thematic points of the film were best covered - the distance between how the townspeople wanted to see themselves and what they really were, their lack of civic virtue in the Machiavellian sense, the infighting among themselves in the face of a common danger and why and how that occurs, and of course most of all how and why they had it coming, meaning how the ending of the film made sense.
To take a specific example, say the picnic tables, their purpose I think is clear. the food and alcohol set out on them was meant to symbolize the ambiguous and ambivalent nature of the relation of the townspeople to Bridges and his gang. Things offered, but not really meant to be, offered without expectation they will be accepted, all going back to what was their backstory of the deal they had that neither side really wanted to have, and to live up to. But not only that - the tables showed the shaky relation between offers of material goods and moral virtue, shaky because of that very ambivalence of purpose, not to mention how offers of objects and morality have a tenuous at best relationship.
Despite the assertion of Eastwood fandom here, I think the OP did not get this film.
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