Eastwood's first western as director was "High Plains Drifter" (1973), in which he also starred. The film had a moral and supernatural theme, later emulated in "Pale Rider". The plot follows a mysterious stranger (Eastwood) who arrives in a brooding Western town where the people hire him to protect them against three soon-to-be-released felons. There remains confusion during the film as to whether the stranger is the brother of the deputy, whom the felons lynched and murdered, or his ghost. Holes in the plot were filled with black humor and allegory, influenced by Leone. The revisionist film received a mixed reception, but was a major box-office success. A number of critics thought Eastwood's directing was "as derivative as it was expressive," with Arthur Knight of the "Saturday Review" remarking that Eastwood had "absorbed the approaches of Siegel and Leone and fused them with his own paranoid vision of society." John Wayne, who had declined a role in the film, sent a letter to Eastwood soon after the film's release in which he complained that, "The townspeople did not represent the true spirit of the American pioneer, the spirit that made America great."