• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, November 9, 2022

An enigmatic Native American is a Clint Eastwood of the high plains in the new Amazon Prime Video series “The English.”

The “English” of the title refers to the way some Native Americans referred generally to the white pioneers who settled on lands that had once been the exclusive province of the Great Plains tribes.

But the word also refers to an Englishwoman who travels to Indian country seeking revenge for the murder of her child. 

The woman, Lady Cornelia Locke, is played by Emily Blunt, pictured above. The Pawnee she meets just after encountering her first close brush with death at a forlorn hotel in the middle of nowhere, Eli Whipp, is played by Chaske Spencer.

This six-episode limited series, dropping this Friday (November 11) tells the story of the relationship between two people who could not be more different. But how different are they? Time will tell.

Eli Whipp is a man of few words and handy with a gun -- not unlike the many “Man With No Name” characters played by Clint Eastwood for more than three decades.

Note: Sometimes the “Man With No Name” actually had a name -- Josey Wales, for example, in “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” but you get the point.

Like those movies -- including the “Fistful of Dollars” trilogy, “High Plains Drifter,” “Pale Rider,” “Unforgiven” and others -- the key to success often lies in the staging of their signature confrontations in which the lone gunman faces off with three, four or more gun-toting hombres and manages to slay them all.

When done correctly, they are deeply satisfying to a viewer of Clint Eastwood movies and now, “The English.”

Though he is companion to a white woman in the Old West,  Eli Whipp is no Tonto. He is an educated, English-speaking individualist whose ambition is to travel to Oklahoma to stake a claim to some land of his own stemming from the Homestead Act of 1863.

As an Indian, he faces long odds accomplishing this goal, but he feels he can register like any other American for one reason -- he was a sergeant in the United States Army working as a scout for Uncle Sam.

In the series, the year is 1890. Indians are still battling “the English” and their armies, but the writing is on the wall -- the United States has won.

What’s left are thieves, cutthroats and highwaymen who still drift across the plains and sometimes kill or are killed themselves, especially when they have the misfortune to cross paths with Eli Whipp.

He is no wanton killer, however. He is a man of principal and contradictions who resists categorization.

This series is easy to categorize, though. Classify it as another feather in Amazon’s cap. 

“The English” starts streaming on Friday (November 11) on Amazon Prime.