In 1968, Clint Eastwood was in the midst of his evolution from a television star in Rawhide to an International movie star with the Dollars Trilogy. His first American film with this new status was Hang ‘Em High which is now available in a 4K Ultra HD Blu-Ray release from Kino Lorber Studio Classics. Watching this in 4k brings new details to the film that I’ve never seen in previous viewings. As Clint Eastwood recently celebrated his 96th birthday, it’s time to look at this film in context of what went before and the films he would direct in the future.
Buy Hang ‘Em HighIn the previous three years (1964-1967), Clint had become an Italian movie star with A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad & The Ugly. They were just making a splash with American audiences, and it was time for Eastwood to decide on his next project. He turned down bigger-budget offerings to do a smaller-budget film under the name of his newly minted production company, Malpaso.
The story starts with a first act that could be right out of a Spaghetti Western. Jed Cooper (Eastwood) is taken for a cattle thief and hung by a posse of nine men led by Captain Wilson (Ed Begley). They leave him for dead, but he’s still alive when a passerby cuts him down. Cooper (yes, trying to evoke comparisons to Gary Cooper makes this less of a coincidence) is let out of prison and becomes a Deputy Marshall to take out his revenge.
The result of Clint Eastwood’s first American-made Western is a transition somewhere on the continuum between the Spaghetti Western and a TV Western show. Clint and Malpaso chose director Ted Post, known for television episodes before this film. The cast is made up of up-and-coming actors like Pat Hingle, Bruce Dern, and Dennis Hopper. It’s also cast with character and television actors like Alan Hale, Jr., Ed Begley, and Ben Johnson. The film has Leone-influenced shots, especially noteworthy in the first scene, the crazy titles and the few scenes shot in the New Mexico dessert (the fight with Bruce Dern in White Sands is shot like a Leone tribute). There are scenes, like the trials in Pat Hingle’s courtroom, could be on the MGM set of any number of television dramas. There’s a romance between Clint and Inger Stevens that would feel completely out of place in Clint’s previous three films.
I view this less as an attempt to copy the work Eastwood did with Leone and more as the evolution of the Western in 1968. This isn’t a film about vengeance, like it would be in the hands of Leone, where the actions of the characters are always about getting even. There’s a nice feint in this film where the confrontation with the first of the posse, hints that the rest of the film might be Eastwood extracting his revenge one by one until he gets to Begley. That’s where this film hints at the future works of Eastwood, including Unforgiven (1992) where there isn’t as much killing as there is acknowledging the consequences of every death. There’s a great seen with Begley, L.Q. Jones, and other members of the posse discussing their regret over the lynching that is particularly out of place in most Westerns. There’s a three-minute scene here of the supporting cast have a philosophical discussion. That was a social commentary that didn’t exist in many Western films of that day.
The title would lead you to believe that the “Hang ‘Em” was Clint’s Cooper character. It’s equally plausible that the main villain of the film is Judge Adam Fenton, played wonderfully by Pat Hingle. This judge is a hanging judge that rules the town. Hingle would star with Eastwood a few more times in his career, and they play very well off of each other. Hingle’s Judge Fenton looks down over the town from the third-floor apartment above the courthouse. There’s a great soliloquy at the end of the film that sums up the movie’s message about capital punishment delivered by Hingle. He talks about the role of the Judge as God who watches the city through his windows high above.
It is that Third Act where the movie flips from the revenge of getting back at the men who lynched Cooper, to the uncomfortable moments when you realize that the city has shown up like turning out for a sporting event. The camera is no longer the artful closeups of a Leone production. The camera is often still and framed like a television show to allow the story to feel less personal. The action is no longer building, but it’s playing out in a more natural way. There’s a stretching out of the story after the second set of hangings. I think that’s part of why the film doesn’t live in the same pantheon as his later American Westerns.
Hang ‘Em High was an important film for the Western genre in America to address the audience popularity of the foreign Westerns. The Malpaso production company proved to be an on-time, under-budget group that would produce films that would make money for the studios. This film opened with bigger grosses for MGM than even the contemporary James Bond films. The best scenes are on-location shots in New Mexico, and there’s a lack of energy to the scenes on the MGM sets. A major part of Eastwood’s films for Malpaso would be that they were almost 100% shot on location. Director Post allows Eastwood to do more with silence than most directors would put up with for their lead actor. That is a big part of this important nod to the Dollars Trilogy that would set the style for Westerns in the ’70s.
The Blu-ray has two excellent commentaries as extras. Film historians Lem Dobbs and Nick Redman provide a good commentary on the impact of the film. There’s a better commentary by filmmaker/historian Steve Mitchell that puts Clint’s past and future experiences into perspective along with the connections to television shows past and future. The 4K transfer is crisp, especially in the daylight scenes and on set. There’s a scene near the end in the dark with Eastwood approaching a house and a shootout that never transferred well to video, that’s much clearer now.
The film is important, and I highly recommend it. There’s an important message, but mostly it’s a dress rehearsal for the huge success that Malpaso would have for decades afterwards.
