The entire film reminded me of the movie Boondock Saints, at the very beginning when Conner and Murphy are at church and the priest's sermon speaks of Kitty Genovese and the indifference of good men.
If the Stranger was a bad man I think I would have felt some remorse about what he did to the towns people, but I didn't. I felt it was an ingenious form of pay back.
The only part that was hard to swallow was when he took the woman into the barn and had his way with her, yet even that was softened by the way she started clinging to him before it was over. She was more upset that he didn't buy her dinner first than anything. When she bumped into and and tried to make him feel the fool, she was just trying to get him to notice her so that they could spend a little time in the sack together and perhaps she could get a few pretty baubles along with a good time.
No, the whole thing about antiheroes is that the anti-hero is a negative figure because society itself is corrupt. Normally, it's the job of a hero to save society--even if society isn't very nice, as in Stagecoach. Heroes restore social order. But in High Plains Drifter, restoring social order means exposing the townspeople for their own culpability in criminal behavior. Eastwood's character is an anti-hero, because he sets himself against a corrupt society, but presumably himself embodies moral values (though that point is debatable, in this instance).
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