Screen

...With stylized gestures and menacing glances, Eastwood preserves in Pale Rider the feel of the samurai film on which his earlier "spaghetti Westerns" {High Plains Drifter, or The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) were based...

...On the surface, Pale Rider is populist, with Eastwood rousing the small-time miners to protect their economic rights against Commonweal: 468 monopoly...

...On the other hand, there is too frequent use of chiaroscuro to contrast good and evil for the sake of the parable...

...The makers of St...

...One young Democrat (Judd Nelson) becomes a young Republican out of a desire, we are supposed to believe, for a longer sofa...

...Elmo's Fire borrows a formula but lacks an ingredient: a sense of the real stakes in living, in growing, in time...

...One is forced to strain — like the miners, apparently — to read the intentions of the mysterious stranger...

...Struggle and peril are missing...

...In short, Eastwood plagiarizes from the classics but shortchanges the humanity of the characters...

...he is able to project inferiority, if only by seeming to embody an outrage that he is honor-bound to avenge...

...Elmo's Fire is diploma thin...

...Pale Rider is no ordinary shoot-em-up...

...They're simply the heavyweights of Lite culture, the demigods for the many Keri's and Shari's and Staci's and Seans so dear to a studio's "heart...

...Mencken warned of democratic tendencies toward linguistic inflation (see his discussion of garbagemen et al as "sanitary engineers" in The American Language...

...A young would-be writer (Andrew McCarthy) aspires through the length of the film ("labors" would be too strong a term) to print an article on "the meaning of life...

...The very brevity of their names, or nicknames, betrays them...

...The Big Chill served as a prolonged wake in which the self-indulgence of the characters could be viewed in an initially tragic context...

...His victory is so predictable, the film lacks any suspense...

...Eastwood has made a second career for himself in recent years by providing such pleasure in his "Dirty Harry" series of detective films (Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, and Tightrope), but their electricity is missing in Pale Rider, perhaps for an ironic reason...

...Elmo's Fire is forgiveable for its sin of celebrating callow youth with a callow screenplay...

...In Shane the pathos of this scene rests on the child's intuitive understanding that his mother had fallen in love with the mysterious stranger...

...In the earlier film, the suicide comes first (the corpse is being dressed for the funeral during the credits...

...For example, in evoking Shane and High Noon, he borrows the grit of their heroes but none of their sense of conflict or doubt about the eventual outcome of their battles...

...But this crude example of the imitative fallacy merely underscores the inflated seriousness, almost narcissism, in which Eastwood cloaks his hero...

...The on-location cinematography by Bruce Surtees is often superb...

...Here he also does a classic samurai bit with a hickory stick...

...But the effort fails and the result is a corpse — somber, imposing, and lifeless...

...From Shane, Eastwood borrows the core of his plot, transforming its struggle of nesters versus ranchers to a conflict between folksy miners and a big-time capitalist trying to monopolize land claims...

...The Washington setting — an apt place if one wishes to examine "yuppie" attitudes — here functions as a passive background...

...When he held his .38 to the skull of pne such lawbreaker ("Go ahead, make my day," Dirty Harry dared), Eastwood struck a very raw American nerve...

...no reflections on what it really means to be a recent college graduate — what blind ambition, ambivalences or holding patterns that might imply...

...provided one of the most powerful and ambiguous conclusions to any Western...

...throughout, with contrived camera shots, he seems to materialize from the thin Sierra air itself...

...at the end, we are told, he succeeds (find me his editor...

...In short, the major premise of the film goes unexplored...

...The film reveals three strong urges of contemporary movie makers: first, to imitate the success of The Big Chill, with its emphasis on individual-cum-group growth and revaluation...

...Elmo's Fire fails even on its own limited terms...

...At times, St...

...But Eastwood's mysterious stranger shares none of Alan Ladd's reluctance to take up guns to solve the issue...

...Apologists for the film (a big summer money winner) claim that its sole purpose is to showcase its ensemble of young "stars...

...In Pale Rider, however, this subtlety is lost: with the young woman, as well as her mother (Carrie Snodgrass), in love with Eastwood, there is no ambivalence toward him, only a kind of universal sexual worship...

...There are 6 September 1985: 469 winning scenes of devil-may-care youthful exuberance, and touching scenes of friendship...

...it does reach for a "message" beyond sheer action...

...The film's one black is a hooker...

...Toward the end, the group even puts aside its enormous collective ego to prevent a suicide...

...Even his innovations make this evident, particularly the substitution of a young woman (Sydney Penney) for the little boy whose heartfelt cry, "Shane, come back...

...Aside from one or two passages, there are no specific links between the challenges the characters face and their age and situation...

...In St...

...ELMO'S fire is a portrait of seven well-to-do recent college graduates trying to find themselves somewhere amid sex, drugs, booze, and Washington...

...Worse, St...

...As a result, the social satire in St...

...What gave these films power was the brutal, half-truthful way that they pointed out the defects of contemporary jurisprudence...

...From High Noon, Eastwood steals frequent shots of ominous-looking railroad tracks, and a closing gunfight sequence where, much like Gary Cooper, his mysterious stranger uses the nooks and crannies of a Western town to outwit a gang of bad guys...

...The major question at its release was whether or not it could' 'revive the Western," one of Hollywood's currently moribund genres...

...Eastwood rides down from the mountains at the opening of Pale Rider, and ascends the mountains at the end...

...The film, which Eastwood wrote and directed himself, attempts artificial respiration by breathing new life into the plots of several past masterpieces, particularly Shane and High Noon...

...There is none of Cooper's fear, however, which gave his silent bravery its nervy edge...

...second, to exploit the marketability of its young "stars...

...The only pleasure it canprovide is the fun of watching the bad guys get it...

...Like the film's style and content, its political theme is presented as stiffly as a corpse...

...The film's tone implies that economic exploitation has been taken care of...

...What remains is drugs and sex — problems as evident on campus or among alumni, as among recent graduates...

...Appropriately perhaps, a corpse also dominates the plot of Pale Rider...

...In truth, what Pale Rider lacks most is mystery, or at least some uncertainty, about the hero's powers...

...Names like Ally Sheedy, Rob Lowe, and Demi Moore hardly belong in the same class as Betty Davis, or even (maybe) Meryl Streep...

...Eastwood's pastiche of previous films produces more boredom than tension...

...When Eastwood first reaches a camp of poor, honest miners under siege from local thugs, his approach is prefaced by a reading from Apocalypse on the "pale horseman named Death" — hence, the title of the film...

...Nevertheless, the film presents the establishment of justice in the old West as an inevitable process...

...Less through dialogue than cinematography, the suggestion is persistently made that the central character, Eastwood's "mysterious stranger," has returned to life as a quasi-religious avenger (sometimes garbed as a preacher) to punish past misdeeds of the film's villains...

...It thus shares an important theme of its "parent,'' The Big Chill, but only to underline a difference...

...One WASPy-looking young woman (Mare Winningham) supposedly belongs to a Jewish family including a stereotypical, materialistic father (Martin Balsam...

...But while ascending the high ridge that separates hokey mysticism from true grandeur, Eastwood loses traction...

...Elmo's Fire, there is little to provide depth to the characterization, neither in death, nor, simply, the passage of time in growth to adulthood...

...Dirty Harry regularly collared sadistic thugs sprung from jail by lenient judges and hired-gun defense lawyers...

...Elmo's Fire thus blatantly dis-serves the audience it was meant to address...

...But he has written himself into a position of stale omnipotence...

...during some prolonged night-time takes, the film is simply hard to see...

...Eastwood can convey depth, unlike some of the strong-and-silent actors now popular (Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, or Arnold Schwarzenegger...

...With the late autumnal footage of golden aspens and the constant shag rug of early snow, many scenes are enough to chill one to the bone...

...No one, perhaps, expected how literal Eastwood's attempt at revivification would be...

...The "mysterious stranger" in Pale Rider expresses invincibility not anger, and his passionlessness belies the film's attempt to moderate Eastwood's political image...

...and third, to tailor a product to fit an audience demographically defined...

...Elmo's Fire, like many politicians, seem more concerned about finding something to fit the narcissism of a particular group than addressing an interesting idea to an audience with lively minds...

...Long ago, H.L...

...TOM O'BRIEN...

...Indeed, there are even anachronistic digs against "rape of the land" by the large operator's hydraulic pumps...