Seeing as Clint Eastwood has on occasion expressed his admiration for The Oxbow Incident, a 1940s Western dealing with the lynching of three innocent men accused of rustling, it comes as no surprise that the beginning of Hang ‘Em High opens with the lynching of Mr. Eastwood himself.
As the blurb on the poster declared, “They made two mistakes. They hanged the wrong man and they didn’t finish the job”. If they only knew.
Seeing as this is the first Western that Eastwood starred in after the success of the Dollar trilogy there are obvious similarities between the Leone movies and this Hollywood opus.
The first thing that strikes you is how much the main theme by Dominic Frontiere samples Morricone’s use of bells and guitar, almost as if Frontiere is auditioning for Leone’s next Western.
Throw in the almost casual regard for human life that one found mainly only at that time in the so-called “Spaghetti” Westerns and you have one of the first Hollywood attempts at an Italian-style cowboy film.
Where Hang ‘Em High wins out over the pretend Italian cowboy films is a wonderful supporting cast who embody all that Sergio Leone and his fellow Italian directors were unable to replicate, no matter how many actors they managed to import from America, namely genuine Western character actors.
Apart from the wonderful Ben Johnson there’s also Dennis Hopper, L.Q. Jones, Charles McGraw and last, but definitely not least, a certain Bruce Dern, four years before his career-breaking role as John Wayne-killer Asa Watts in The Cowboys.
This being a Clint Eastwood film you just know he’s not going to rest until he tracks down the men who tried to lynch him, his character Jed Cooper taking up the offer after he’s been cut down from the hanging tree by Ben Johnson to become an official Marshall.
This enables him to catch the bad guys lawfully, which he does with gusto. It all turns a bit sour for Jed though when Judge Fenton, played by Pat Hingle, insists on stringing up a couple of young boys who joined in with Bruce Dern on a rustling spree.
The public hanging sequence is the centre-piece of the film, and I have to admit that the execution of the two young boys is still hard to watch. I’d go so far as to say it leaves a bit of a nasty taste in the mouth as their characters don’t really deserve to die, not in such a manner anyway.
After that the film, for me anyway, kind of goes downhill.
Cooper tracks down the men who tried to lynch him at the beginning of the film, the leader of the gang taking the easy way out by hanging himself rather than face judicial execution in front of a large crowd.
A few loose ends are tied up, Cooper gets the girl and then that’s it really.
Upon reflection the transition from Italian Western cowboy star to big-screen Hollywood cowboy stardom was not necessarily guaranteed with Eastwood’s first foray into the genre after working on the Dollar trilogy.
Maybe a better choice of director might have helped, Ted Post having worked more in TV than feature films, although Eastwood had no problem working with him again on the second Dirty Harry movie, Magnum Force.
Still, we have to be thankful for small mercies. At least Clint didn’t decide to do McKenna’s Gold instead after The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. That would have killed his return to Hollywood dead in its tracks.