Paint Your Wagon, based on the book by Alan Jay Lerner - 7 out of 10

Paint Your Wagon, based on the book by Alan Jay Lerner
7 out of 10


Writers from Variety, Chicago Sun-Times and especially Empire have been very critical of this film.

Empire in particular makes an excellent, amusing point when it mentions the fact that 'Eastwood went on to star with an orangutan, twice, so this is only his third maddest film'...at the time when the chronicle was written anyway.

What is more puzzling, perhaps even shocking is the fact that The New York Times has a negative take on the $ 20 million paid and lack of 'cinematic accomplishment'.
Why is this film then included on the same New York Times' Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made list?

The mystery might be that one critic liked it enough to place it in prestigious company, while another thought much less of it.
Could they both be right?

This cinephile thought that it is somewhat hard to come to a definite conclusion on this motion picture.
That was when in a kind mood.

Now, after cycling in the rain, amidst car traffic I would just say, like Donnie Brasco:

'Forget about it!'

It is silly, long, preposterous, at times idiotic and if they gathered Jack Nicholson, Robert de Niro, Marlon Brando and all the other possible cinematic gods, it would still be ridiculous.
Take that initiative of digging tunnels under this No Name city.

Ok, let us assume we could start with that.
But then the whole climax, the demolition of all the houses, the charging bull that keeps showing in front or behind Ben Rumson aka Lee Marvin is just stupid and way too long.

Some parts of the film are acceptable.
Indeed, the feminist perspective is so laudable as to make it rather modern...

Well, for the few minutes that deal with the ménage a trois arranged between Ben Rumson, Pardner aka Clint Eastwood and Elizabeth aka Jean Seberg.
Having two men accept to be 'married' with the same woman looks as if women rights would be finally equal with men rights.

Elizabeth tells her husband, Ben, that she loves Pardner.
When Rumson is about to leave his house, she maintains that she loves him too.

They think about it over a bottle of whiskey and arrive at the conclusion that they would all stay together, not as a couple, but as a 'triple'.
After all, the beautiful, smart, determined, visionary woman had been bought for $ 800 by Ben.

She had been the unhappy second wife of a Mormon.
And she says:

If a Mormon can have more wives, why can't a woman have two husbands?


Alas, this only works up to the point where they have some refugees in the house and Elizabeth wants desperately to be respectable.
Therefore, she pretends she is married to Pardner.

And only to him.

On the one hand, we have this unusual relationship, in which men accept a less domineering role, but then there are plenty other dimensions of the film that seem archaic.
The arrival of what is called today sex workers and they were then named whores, is the occasion of more abuse.

They are taken to the No Name town by a group led by Rumson.
Their will seems to be of no interest to the exclusively male population of the place.

Since there is no female companionship, they have to bring these six presumably French workers to town.
The treatment of horses is not even considered for a moment.

Forget about the characters in the film, who lived at the time of the California gold rush.
The filmmakers had no qualms about making the poor animals gallop through the difficult, surely at times impossible, painful river bed.

Animal welfare was not something to think about, when shooting this feature.

Finally, one of the Best 1,000 films ever made?
Not in my book.