Year of Eastwood #14

Paint Your Wagon (1969)

Starring: Eastwood, Lee Marvin
Directed by Joshua Logan

Three words that will instantly divide the legions of die-hard Clint fans: Paint Yer Wagon. Love it or hate it - it’s seemingly impossible not to have a strong opinion on this musical Western. Some fans proudly declare Paint Yer Wagon as the best Clint movie ever with a kick ass soundtrack to boot and others will spit in your eye if you start singing a few lines from Wand’rin’ Star. The film has even so inspired some middle school English teachers to sing a few ditties from the Wagon during class.

Clint is Pardner with Lee Marvin, searching for gold and escaping all those pesky social norms of livin‘ with the civilized. They strike it rich and life is high - living with hundreds of other men, dancing in the mud, and singing about beans. But when one of them there Mormon travels into town with his two wives, the men suddenly remember the one thing missing from their Utopia … the friendly comfort of the female persuasion. Marvin (playing the same drunken character that won him an Oscar in Cat Ballou) outbids all the other fellas for one of the Mormon’s wives. When he sobers up, Marvin angers up his blood over the lusty way all the town folk look at his lovely, young bride. So the men decide the only thing better than a mining town in the hills full of hairy men is to build themselves the best little whorehouse in Gold Country.

Paint Yer Wagon is really a feminism picture at heart. Sure there’s all that prostitutin’ and ownership of women’s mineral rights - but when Marvin’s wife falls in love with both Clint and Marvin, she reckons there ain’t no reason she can’t be married to two men. While the threesome lives in marital bliss, the town of No Name (nudge, nudge) prospers with it’s gambling, drinking, and gold dust women. But when the townsfolk start meddling in the trade of fighting bears against bulls, the town sinks into the mud … same thing happened to Michael Vick.

The 1960’s saw the rise of gritty, auteur-style film-makers creating realistic dramas, but the box office records rolled in by the 99 44/100% pure Sound of Music opened the eyes of Hollywood producers that there was still buckets of money to be made with musicals, so they were slapping together anything Broadway had to offer. By the end of the decade, the public’s interest in musicals began to fade, but not until there was one colossal failure to put the nail in the coffin … enter Paint Yer Wagon. Over budget, over schedule, and over the top - Wagon was a complete flop when it was released.

The measure of any musical’s success is its hummability. There ain’t much to hum about in Paint Yer Wagon. Most of the songs are sung by a men’s chorus with a dull collectiveness that might play well in bingo halls, but for the rest of us it signals a good opening for a bathroom break. Yes, Clint does all his own singing and he certainly doesn’t embarrass himself what with the squinting and singing despite the fact that he’s singing about talking to trees.

Clint’s covered just about ever genre: action, comedy, romance, western, and musical. A few years ago there was even a techno dance tune called Clint Eastwood by the animated hip hop group Gorillaz. You pretty much know you’ve made it to icon status when a group of cartoon rock stars sing about what a bad ass you are … unless of course it’s the Banana Splits.