Which 1973 film starring Clint Eastwood features a ghostly gunslinger seeking revenge?

Which 1973 film starring Clint Eastwood features a ghostly gunslinger seeking revenge? The answer is High Plains Drifter.

Eastwood directs and stars in this dark 1973 Western as an unnamed Stranger who rides into Lago, an isolated mining town. The frightened residents hire him to defend them from three outlaws expected to return from prison, but he soon turns the town’s own history of cowardice and corruption against it.

The supernatural reading is deliberately suggestive rather than fully explained. Lago’s citizens once allowed Federal Marshal Jim Duncan to be whipped and killed after he discovered that their gold mine operated illegally on government land. The Stranger experiences vivid dreams of Duncan’s death, survives apparently impossible gunfire, and orders the town painted red before renaming it “Hell.”

At the ending, the Stranger leaves beside Duncan’s grave, whose inscription has finally been completed. The film never plainly says that the Stranger is Duncan’s ghost, but its imagery strongly supports that interpretation. Unlike Eastwood’s more conventional Western heroes, this character is an eerie instrument of retribution.