High Plains Drifter is not a remake of High Noon and it's certainly not a literal continuation. Overall, in setting, tone, mood, style, scope, and sense of heroism, the two films possess nothing in common, with High Plains Drifter attaining visceral levels of darkness and phobia never even sniffed by High Noon.
However, as Eastwood has stated, High Plains Drifter offers a certain lineage to High Noon in the sense that it theoretically asks what may have happened had Gary Cooper's honest sheriff lost his battle with the three outlaws. What would have happened then? Naturally, in High Plains Drifter, Eastwood provides a potential answer, albeit one that is highly stylized, Gothic, and mythological.
I don't know the extent to which Eastwood was motivated by High Noon after he possessed the finished High Plains Drifter script in hand, but the idea of 'retesting' the High Noon premise sparked his interest in the original treatment, thus leading to the crafting of a full-fledged script. Indeed, Eastwood's comments suggest his knowledge of the Western genre and his ability to ironically interpret the medium. Just as Eastwood became attracted by the A Fistful of Dollars script when he recognized it to be a reinterpretation of Yojimbo, he understood how High Plains Drifter could extend and heighten the themes suggested by High Noon.
In 1984, Eastwood told Michael Henry of Positif the following about High Plains Drifter:
"I decided to do it on the basis of a treatment of only nine pages. It's the only time that's happened to me. The starting point was "What would have happened if the sheriff of High Noon had been killed? What would have happened afterwards? In the treatment by Ernest Tidyman, the sheriff's brother came back to avenge the sheriff and the villagers were as contemptible and selfish as in High Noon. But I opted eventually for an appreciably different approach: you would never know whether the brother in question is a diabolic being or a kind of archangel. It's up to the audience to draw their own conclusions. Tidyman wrote the script from this perspective, but he missed a certain number of elements and I rewrote it with the help of Dean Riesner who had collaborated several times with [director Don] Siegel.
... "Maybe because I've always hated corruption within the system, no mater what it is. In this respect, High Plains Drifter goes further than High Noon."
In 1985, Eastwood told Christopher Frayling, a British film professor and biographer, the following:
"But High Plains Drifter was great fun because I liked the irony of it, I liked the irony of doing a stylized version of what happens if the sheriff in High Noon is killed, and symbolically comes back as some avenging angel or something ..."
(For these quotations, see pages, 99-100, 134 of the 1999 edition of Clint Eastwood: Interviews, edited by Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz.)
Incidentally, John Wayne disdained both High Noon and High Plains Drifter ...
By the way, to Eastwood's consternation, Dean Riesner did not receive any writing credit for High Plains Drifter due to a Writer's Guild technicality.
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joekiddlouischama
11 years ago
I'm not really one for lists, but High Noon and High Plains Drifter would each rank among my top-ten Westerns of all-time, with High Plains Drifter making my top-five.
And although, High Plains Drifter is very much its own movie, we can fairly say that without High Noon, High Plains Drifter would not have existed. High Noon created a new premise which, a generation later, High Plains Drifter would take to a whole new level.
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