Many Western stories begin with a mysterious stranger riding into town. Zane Grey’s 1912 novel Riders of the Purple Sage may not have introduced the trope, but the author’s use of it in his most famous novel surely set the table for similar characters in later Western films.

The 1950s saw the arrival of the psychological Western, or the Western-noir, or the dark Western, depending on which term one prefers, and with these new tones, the mysterious stranger began to take shape.

The 1960s then saw the advent of the revisionist Western, and the mysterious stranger went from trope to icon, thanks mostly to Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone. By the time of the spaghetti Westerns, the stranger was a full-on anti-hero, often spectral in nature, frequently motivated by vengeance, and completely ruthless in unleashing violence.

10

The Man From Laramie

Jimmy Stewart’s Will Lockhart is no drifter, but he is a stranger in the town of Coronado, where the locals prove to be less-than-welcoming. Lockhart soon finds himself mixed up in the affairs of a wealthy rancher, who has dreamed of a man like the stranger from Laramie coming to kill his son.

The trouble he faces in Coronado, including having his mules sH๏τ and being jailed for murder, does not convince Lockhart to leave town, and his motives for sticking around remain mysterious for much of the film, contributing to the intrigue surrounding the character.

Anthony Mann made five Westerns with Stewart, and The Man From Laramie is arguably the best, thanks in large part to its being sH๏τ in Cinemascope, making it one of the first Westerns to utilize the format.

9

Decision At Sundown

Bart Allison is bent on revenge. He arrives in the village of Sundown looking to kill the man he holds responsible for driving his wife to suicide. The mysterious stranger throws the town into chaos, but like Joel in The Last of Us, he’s too deep in his own righteous anger to realize he might actually be a monster.

Decision at Sundown’s subversiveness works because Allison is portrayed by Randolph Scott, a white-hatted cowboy actor if ever there was one. Budd Boetticher knows the audience will immediately be on Scott’s side, so it’s legitimately shocking when certain truths emerge, re-casting the hero as the villain.

Though the Western anti-hero was not a fully formed figure in the late 50s, movies like Decision at Sundown were a step toward the works of Sergio Leone and others who forever re-defined the Western protagonist.

8

The Quick And The ᴅᴇᴀᴅ

The mysterious stranger could probably be called “the strange and mysterious man.” Traditionally, it’s males who wander the frontier in Westerns, cut loose from all human attachments, driven on by something mysterious burning within, while women embody home and hearth.

The Quick and the ᴅᴇᴀᴅ is the rare Western that casts a woman in the role of the enigmatic drifter showing up somewhere, weighed down by some unknown thing from their past, and bringing somebody’s doom.

Sharon Stone’s Ellen is seemingly in town to participate in a deeply deranged shoot-out contest, but in true mysterious stranger fashion, she has ulterior motives that eventually reveal themselves. Critics didn’t buy what Sam Raimi was selling when The Quick and the ᴅᴇᴀᴅ came out, but the film’s cult following has only grown.

7

Pale Rider

Nobody loved the “mysterious stranger arrives in town” setup more than Clint Eastwood. In Pale Rider, he plays a Preacher who shows up out of nowhere to help the denizens of a small gold mining camp in their fight against a big company that’s trying to chase them off their claim.

Preacher is unusually skilled at beating people up, and his back is riddled with scars from bullet wounds that look like they should’ve been fatal. He’s either incredibly lucky, or he’s a ghost. Pale Rider gives no answer either way.

It’s perhaps significant that Preacher first appears after a young girl prays to God, seeking divine help for the people in her camp. Eastwood as a guardian angel called down from heaven is sort of a funny idea, butPale Riderisn’t playing for laughs.

6

Bad Day At Black Rock

Spencer Tracy’s one-armed war veteran Macreedy arrives in the isolated town of Black Rock and immediately begins making the townspeople nervous by nosing around in what they consider their business.

Tracy’s effortless sense of authority serves him well as Macreedy, who, like many another mysterious stranger, refuses to leave town even after the locals have gone out of their way to make him feel unwelcome. The revelation of why Macreedy is there packs a punch, as Bad Day at Black Rock explores some pretty heavy post-war themes.

Later Westerns would be much more blunt in addressing the injustice Macreedy has arrived in Black Rock to expose. If it were 1967, and he were played by Clint Eastwood, the character would just shoot everyone. Tracy’s version wins through pure righteousness.

5

Django (1966)

Every mysterious stranger needs a great intro. Franco Nero’s first appearance in Django sees him inexplicably – and symbolically – dragging a coffin, and that’s just the first of many audacious images unleashed by director Sergio Corbucci in his 1966 spaghetti Western shoot-em-up.

What Django carries in his coffin is, of course, a surprise, one that helps Corbucci’s film achieve new levels of cinematic violence. That carnage was shocking in its day, and led to a lot of reviewers dismissing Django.

Jack Nicholson did not dismiss Django when he saw it, and indeed attempted to buy the film’s American rights. Quentin Tarantino also rather enjoyed Django when he later saw it, naming his own blood-soaked 2012 Western Django Unchained, and giving Nero a funny cameo where he learns that the “D” is silent.

4

High Plains Drifter

Eastwood’s mysterious stranger character in High Plains Drifter is literally named “The Stranger,” in case there was any doubt. Before the audience has even settled into their seats, The Stranger has gunned down three men, and Sєxually ᴀssaulted a woman.

Eastwood seems determined to take this character beyond the anti-heroic status of his famous Man With No Name and into truly dark territory. High Plains Drifter was too dark for John Wayne, who loathed the movie so much, he wrote Eastwood a letter about it.

High Plains Drifter has been read as a horror Western, and Eastwood’s character as an avenging ghost. But there’s often something a little supernatural about the mysterious stranger, and that ghostly element doesn’t need to be made literal.

3

Once Upon A Time In The West

The mournful wail of the harmonica is all over Sergio Leone’s greatest Western. The instrument is played in the film by Charles Bronson, whose character is referred to only as “Harmonica.”

With his brooding gaze and stoical demeanor, Bronson was uniquely equipped to play a man from nowhere who drifts into town, giving nothing away about his purpose, but seeming driven by something almost demonic.

Harmonica’s motivations are eventually revealed, as is the significance of the instrument he plays. The plaintive sound he produces, laid on thick by Ennio Moriccone, becomes more menacing as the film goes on, expressing all the things Bronson himself doesn’t give away.

2

Shane

The mysterious stranger is often a former gunfighter who has tried to leave his life of violence behind. In Shane, Alan Ladd’s drifter just wants to do some honest work, but hiring a rancher ultimately means taking a side in an ongoing local dispute, and soon the gun is back in his hand.

Shane is like Clint Eastwood’s character in Unforgiven, a man who is cursed by being skilled at killing. Eastwood’s film is ambivalent about its violence, but Shane takes a much more unambiguous stance. The rancher’s son Joey reveres the gunfighter, but Shane makes it clear that Ladd’s character is not worthy of such worship.

Ladd’s Shane is not a ghost but a ᴅᴇᴀᴅ man walking, and he knows he’s not deserving of being idolized, even as he sets out to rid the valley of guns, making the world a little safer for all the Joeys.

1

A Fistful Of Dollars

Characters like Shane may have pointed the way toward what was to come, but when the Western protagonist finally went full anti-hero, those progenitors were rendered immediately obsolete.

Clint Eastwood’s The Man With No Name has no noble impulses whatsoever. He does not struggle with any inner-demons. It isn’t that his backstory is utterly mysterious, it’s that he doesn’t have a backstory. He might have been conjured into existence at the exact moment the film’s action begins.

Sergio Leone must have realized he was onto something when he looked at the box office returns for A Fistful of Dollars (it ultimately grossed almost $20 million on a budget of under $300,000). The lesson he took from the film was that violence doesn’t have to be wielded for any particular purpose, but can be unleashed for its own sake.

Thanks to Eastwood and Leone, and A Fistful of Dollars, movie violence became poetry, and the mysterious stranger became an angel of death.