Pale Rider 4K Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		0.0
Audio		5.0
Extras		3.5
Overall		4.0

Pale Rider 4K Blu-ray Movie Review

Mine over matter.

Reviewed by Randy Miller III April 25, 2025

It's never too late to celebrate the work of Clint Eastwood, the steely-eyed actor/director who seemingly can't quit, so Warner Bros. has honored his ongoing legacy with 4K upgrades for catalog titles Dirty Harry, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and Pale Rider. Available separately and also in Steelbook form, all three feature new UHD remasters, two primary audio options (including the original theatrical mixes!), and a collection of new and returning extras.

A commercially successful Western made in a decade when the genre had long since faded, Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider is a fairly straightforward effort that finds the director and lead actor operating in cruise control. Our story zeroes in on the poor citizens of Carbon Canyon, CA, who are mostly made up of independent prospectors and their family members under the thumb of ruthless mining industrialist Coy LaHood (Richard Dysart). One makeshift family in particular is Hull Barrett (Michael Moriarty), his divorced girlfriend Sarah Wheeler (Carrie Snodgress), and Sarah's teenage daughter Megan (Sydney Penny), whose dog is killed by some of LaHood's men. Desperate for a miracle, they get one in "The Preacher" (Clint Eastwood), a mysterious man who rides into town on a pale horse like Death himself.

For a synopsis and critique of Pale Rider, please see Kenneth Brown's review of WB's 2008 Blu-ray, which was reissued in 2011 with different cover art but identical disc content. As my rating indicates I'm a little more forgiving of the film's shortcomings, although I'll concede that the smaller budget and other issues make it feel a bit more like a made-for-TV movie rather than a true big-screen spectacle. Likewise, of the three new Eastwood discs Pale Rider stood to benefit the most from a UHD upgrade (especially given that previous release's near-total lack of extras)... and it certainly does benefit, easily beating that older edition in every department except for including a Blu-ray copy of the film.

Pale Rider 4K Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

NOTE: These screenshots are sourced directly from the 4K disc but have been downsampled to 1080p/SDR and thus should not be considered an accurate representation of quality in terms of brightness level, color, and detail.

Visually, Pale Rider shares an awful lot in common with Josey Wales; not just the similar setting and moody, attractive cinematography by Bruce Surtees (who leaves more than a few of his visual fingerprints on this one), but in the overall look of Warner Bros.' stunning new 2160p/HDR10 transfer. It's more than likely sourced from a similarly ultra high-res scan of the original camera negative, since it features many of the same hallmarks seen on both other recent Eastwood 4Ks including an extremely smooth but completely film-like appearance, carefully modulated shadow detail, accurate colors, and just a tight and stable overall look that easily beats the 2008 Blu-ray's aging, VC-1 encoded transfer. Much like Dirty Harry and Josey Wales, Pale Rider now fills out an entire 100GB disc and runs at a consistently high bit rate from start to finish; no obvious compressions issues could be spotted here, and as expected it's as clean as a whistle. Without question, this is one of the larger visual jumps I've seen from Blu-ray to 4K, so die-hard fans of the film should consider this new transfer to be worth the price of admission alone. (But there's more good news to come.)

Pale Rider 4K Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Similar to Dirty Harry and Josey Wales, the default audio here is a new Dolby Atmos track built from a 5.1 remix that was the only English option on all previous digital home video releases. It's an unsurprisingly modern take on material that's now 40 years old but, in my opinion, fits the material surprisingly well and adds plenty of weight to the sporadic action scenes as well as natural elements -- rushing water, weather effects, etc. -- and the original score by composer Lennie Niehaus, who first met Eastwood during their military days and, having just scored Tightrope a year earlier, would continue collaborating during the next few decades before Niehaus' retirement and death in 2020.

Yet like those other new Eastwood 4K releases (and a growing number of recent WB catalog titles, thankfully), Pale Rider also finally gets its original theatrical mix back -- presented here in DTS-HD 2.0 Master Audio (Stereo) -- as a secondary option, which again should please purists greatly. It's an extremely capable effort and gets the job done just fine; though it can't hope to be nearly as enveloping as the Atmos track and doesn't have that immediate "wow" factor, there's something pleasing about two-channel sonic simplicity so having this nostalgic and refreshingly straightforward stereo option is a huge plus in my book. That said, both are worthy efforts so pick your favorite and be happy.

English (SDH) subtitles are offered during the main feature and all extras listed below.

Pale Rider 4K Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

This one-disc release ships in a keepcase with so-so cover art, a matching matte-finish slipcover, and a Digital Copy redemption code. The extras are very solid; three are new (or at least new-to-disc) and we also get two more long-form documentaries that were previously featured on Warner Bros.' 2013 Clint Eastwood 20-Film Collection, which is certainly a nice touch. As expected, the only missing item is Pale Rider's original theatrical trailer.

• NEW! The Diary of Sydney Penny: Lessons From the Set (7:26) - An outlier among WB's new featurettes produced for these recent Eastwood UHDs, this is not a collection of second-hand appreciations for the film but rather a short interview with actor Sydney Penny ("Megan"), who speaks about her first major big-screen role and the on-set experience, including working with Eastwood, and we glimpse a few production stills too.

• NEW! Painting the Preacher: The Cinematography of Pale Rider (8:36) - Many of the key participants from the other new featurettes for Dirty Harry and Josey Wales return here (as does Sydney Penney) for another tritube to cinematographer Bruce Surtees and his invaluable contributions to the film; say what you will about Pale Rider's budget limitations and narrative shortcomings, but it still looks pretty damn good.

• KINDA NEW! Reinventing Westerns (17:36) - Also appearing on Warner Bros.' recent UHD edition of The Outlaw Josey Wales, this 2021 episode of the docuseries Clint Eastwood: A Cinematic Legacy includes a light collection of interviews from Eastwood collaborators, contemporaries, and fans including Mel Gibson, producer Peter Morgan, producer Albert S. Ruddy, producer David Valdes, screenwriter George Gallo, editor Joel Cox, and others, who speak about the actor/director's considerable footprint and legacy in the genre.

• Eastwood Directs: The Untold Story (61:41)

• The Eastwood Factor (98:27)

Pale Rider 4K Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Clint Eastwood's only Western made during the 1980s, Pale Rider usually isn't ranked anywhere near the top of the director's greatest hits but was very successful in its day and still carries a certain straightforward charm. It's "lesser" legacy was mirrored in WB's 2008 Blu-ray, where it was saddled with underwhelming A/V merits and no real extras to speak of. WB's superb new UHD, released alongside two celebrated Eastwood classics linked above, resurrects Pale Rider with a much-needed A/V overhaul and several new and legacy bonus features. Recommended.