Adventures on the Internet

Jan and Peter are The Edukators - a kind of Baader-Meinhof-lite pair. They target wealthy households, breaking in and rearranging the furniture whilst the owners are away, and leaving notes saying "Your days of plenty are numbered" or "You have too much money". Jan explains that having one's house broken in to is a disturbing experience, and as they queue to withdraw money in the bank, their targets will be reminded that they are completely alone in the world.

Whilst Peter is away, his girlfriend Jule persuades Jan to break into the villa of a wealthy businessman (Hardenberg) who has sued her for 100,000 Euros following a motorway accident. Returning to the villa the next day to retrieve Jule's mobile phone, they are disturbed by Hardenberg and end up kidnapping and taking him to a remote mountain chalet, along with Peter, who has returned from Barcelona. In the days spent in the mountains the young activists deliver some solid anti-capitalist rhetoric, and there are signs of the Stockholm Syndrome setting in, particularly as Hardenberg reveals his involvement in the student protests of 1968.

The film moves towards a satisfying conclusion, leaving viewers in no doubt about where their sympathies should lie.
Essential viewing.

In only his third directorial outing Clint Eastwood addresses what was to become a recurring theme in his work - that of law and order in the USA over the past century, in a semi-mystical work attuned to the cultural mores of the early 1970s.

The remote mining town of Lago serves as the setting for a tale of crime and punishment, corruption and vengeance in a self-governing community, far from the reach of the coastal elites.

Eastwood emphasises the importance of symmetry in film-making, as in the rest of life by beginning and ending the work with an anonymous stranger riding into and then out of Lago through a shimmering heat haze, the unstable image hinting at the shifting nature of the certainties that lie at the heart of frontier life.

The stranger's impact on Lago is immediate, as he despatches to an early grave the town's three hired security men in a dazzling display of sharpshooting, aptly described by one of the locals as "the darnedest piece of shooting I ever did see!"
On the strength of his virtuosity with a revolver, the town elders decide to install the stranger as their new protector, offering in return "anything he wants". The wisdom of this arrangement is soon called into question as the stranger, lacking any democratic accountability, makes decisions favouring the minority immigrant workforce, at the expense of the well being of Lago's middle classes. Soon the townspeople are set against each other just at the time when they most need to be united against the impending threat from returning outlaw Stacey Bridges and his cousins.

The stranger prepares Lago for the showdown with Bridges by turning the town into a vision of Hell, and when the outlaws duly arrive raining down chaos and destruction, the overwhelming influence of Hieronymus Bosch on Eastwood is clear to see with several of the latter scenes from the film modelled closely on the central panel of Bosch's masterpiece, The Last Judgement. The Stranger sits god-like in judgement on the sins of the townspeople of Lago, battling for their lives in the nightmarish landscape below.

A morality tale for modern times.
Essential viewing.