1968
Starring: Clint Eastwood, Inger Stevens, Ed Begley, Bruce Dern, Pat Hingle, Charles McGraw, Ruth White
Director: Ted Post
Runtime: 114 Minutes
Distributor: MGM
Rating: R

This minor Clint Eastwood effort might be the most unfortunate western ever made. Despite being an excellent tale of revenge with delicate musings on man’s fallible nature, it has three major problems; It isn’t A Fistful of dollars, It isn’t For a Few dollars More, and it isn’t The Good The Bad And The Ugly. As the first post-Sergio Leone Clint Eastwood western, coming less than a year after the diminutive Italian forever altered the landscape of the American western, turning it on its head, Hang em High is thrown into a very harsh and somewhat unfair examination where everything about Leone’s masterful style that is absent just screams at you. It’s like showing up to watch your favorite football team play the local derby and finding out that they are fielding their reserve side. The shortcomings are ultimately not the film’s fault, but are also inescapable under the circumstances.

It’s something of a shame because Hang em High is in fact far from terrible. This dutiful story of a falsely accused rancher lynched and left for dead, only to be rescued and subsequently deputized to bring those same men to justice is layered, intelligent and very entertaining. It doesn’t have Leone, but Ted Post is more than capable of setting up some memorable confrontations – not least between Eastwood’s fiery Marshall and Pat Hingle’s conflicted judge, a man charged with the unpleasant task of deciding who goes free and who swings in the breeze.

It doesn’t have the Man With No Name, but it does have Eastwood’s magnificent screen presence and his by then perfected swagger. Eastwood is a man totally at ease with the idea that he is now the single coolest man on the entire planet. The story might be smaller in scope than we had previously been spoiled with, and the macabre humor is lacking, but there is some real substance here. Post plays with ideas of vengeance and obsession, exploring the inconsistencies between conceptual justice and that which is meated out and colored by bias, prejudice and perception. The film questions whether the only difference between a lynching and a legally sanctioned execution is a man in a robe to say it’s so. As the performances go Eastwood is typically excellent, Hingle is actually better and Bruce Dern puts in a fine turn as the newly appointed Marshall’s character testing prisoner. While Hang em High is certainly one of Eastwood’s lesser westerns, that is more a testament to the incredibly high standards he consistently set throughout his career than any real reflection of this film by itself.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 at 11:25 pm and is filed under Feature Films, Reviews, Western. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.