Word: stranger
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High Plains Drifter is the one about the corrupt town that hires a stranger who is fast with his gun and slow with his lip to protect itself from the consequences of its own venality and hypocrisy. In this instance it is a gang of murderous psychopaths who once did the dirty work of the town's leading citizens, were doublecrossed by them and now intend to vengefully sack the place...
...supporting players−a cowardly sheriff, the good woman, the bad woman, an exceedingly pious preacher, the cowardly and manipulative town fathers and even a friendly midget (Billy Curtis)−are stylized rather than characterized. As befits a star's role, The Stranger (he is carefully given no proper name) is a little more complicated...
Part of the time The Stranger is Dirty Harry in cowboy boots, a good cop trying to do his duty in a world ungrateful for his sadistic efforts. Part of the time he is Christ reincarnated; in another life (a recurring dream informs us), he suffered a version of Calvary inflicted on him by this very town. Since the citizenry so painfully rejected his previous efforts at salvation, it develops that this second attempt is actually a form of punishment for their earlier transgressions. Heavy stuff, and never more ludicrously so than when he forces them to literally paint their...
...miniature solar system in which negatively charged electrons blithely circle the positive nucleus, they found that the "electrons kept jumping from one orbit into a different orbit without passing through intervening space - as if the earth were suddenly transferred into the orbit of Mars without having to travel." Even stranger notions were still to come, he says, when physicists succeeded in producing such ghostlike particles as the neutrino (which has no mass, no electrical charge, and can hurtle with ease through the entire earth). In view of all this, argues Koestler, there should well be room in the "common sense...
...ahead by being aggressive. People who look for the police to solve this problem are looking in the wrong direction." Meanwhile, Dr. Tanay warns that the chances of getting murdered in a gun-laden society are so great that it is unwise ever to argue with a stranger during, say, a traffic mishap...