Pale Rider is a 1985 American Western film produced and directed by Clint Eastwood, who also stars in the lead role.

Sarah's teenage daughter, Megan – desperate for deliverance from LaHood after a gang of his men attack the mining camp and kill her dog – prays for a miracle.

When Hull heads to town to pick up supplies, four of Lahood's men harass and assault him before the stranger intervenes and effortlessly fights them off with an axe handle.

Hull thankfully invites his rescuer to dinner and, while the stranger is washing, notices what appears to be six bullet wounds in his back.

Spider Conway, one of the miners and Coy's former partner, discovers a large gold nugget in the dry creek bed and rides into town with his teenage sons, where he yells drunken abuse at LaHood from the street.

Pale Rider was primarily filmed in the Boulder Mountains and the Sawtooth National Recreation Area in central Idaho, just north of Sun Valley in late 1984.

"[7] However, whereas Eastwood's 1973 western, High Plains Drifter, resolves its storyline by means of a series of unfolding flashback narratives (although ambiguity still remains), Pale Rider does not include any such obvious clues to the nature and past of Preacher other than six bullet wound scars on his back and his relationship with Stockburn, who claims he once knew a man like the Preacher.

The movie's title is taken from the Book of Revelation, chapter 6, verse 8: "And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him."

The reading of the biblical passage describing this character is neatly choreographed to correspond with the sudden appearance of the Preacher, who arrived as a result of a prayer from Megan, in which she quoted Psalm 23.

The site's consensus states: "Nearly a decade after The Outlaw Josey Wales, Clint Eastwood returns as a director to the genre that made his name with this elegant, spiritual Western that riffs on the classic Shane.

[14] In his review in The New York Times, Vincent Canby praises Clint Eastwood's performance: "This veteran movie icon handles both jobs [lead actor and director] with such intelligence and facility I'm just now beginning to realize that, though Mr. Eastwood may have been improving over the years, it's also taken all these years for most of us to recognize his very consistent grace and wit as a film maker," concluding that "it's so evocative of a fabled time and place that it never allows the movie to self-destruct in parody.

[the] movie is real pretty, full of little gold aspens and snow-capped mountains, but it is slow, dark and badly timed.

"[18] Richard Corliss finds the film overly derivative, saying: "When Eastwood, who also directed the picture (from a Michael Butler-Dennis Shryack script), faces off against Russell's Maleficent Seven, viewers may get an old-fashioned western tingle.

Channel 4 News did not secure permanent exclusivity rights to Hawkshaw's theme, titled "Best Endeavours", resulting in it also being used for the trailer for Pale Rider.