Hang ‘Em High (1968)

When Clint Eastwood left America for Italy he was a TV actor with a few bit parts in feature films. When he returned, he was an international movie star. My business trips should be so successful.

His first film back in the U.S. tried to emulate the look and feel of his spaghetti westerns. Even his Italian director, Sergio Leone, was asked to visit here to shoot the film. Leone was already involved in Once Upon a Time in the West so he declined the offer and the job went to a TV director who had worked with Eastwood on Rawhide, Ted Post. Dominic Frontiere’s score is more successful at imitating Ennio Morricone than Post was at mimicking Leone. Frontiere’s hangman leitmotif—five notes followed by a crash of instruments replicating the sound of a gallows door dropping open—is repeated during the film’s most tense moments.

Eastwood is former lawman Jed Cooper. As the story begins, he is driving a small herd of cattle across a river. On the far bank he is stopped by a posse looking for the man who stole these cattle and murdered their owner. Capt. Wilson is the leader, a sweaty and belligerent Ed Begley, who refuses to accept Cooper’s bill of sale and orders him men (including Bruce Dern, Alan Hale, Jr. and L.Q. Jones) to hang him high.

Which they do.

Then they ride off and leave the body swinging in the breeze. Moments after they depart, Sheriff David Bliss (Ben Johnson) rides up, cuts down the barely breathing Cooper, and takes him into Fort Grant (substituted for Ft. Smith, Arkansas) to be investigated by the notorious “hanging judge” Adam Fenton (in place of Judge Isaac Parker.

Fenton (Pat Hingle) discovers that Cooper is innocent when another man in his jail confesses to the crime, and to prevent Cooper from riding the vengeance trail and getting himself into real trouble, the judge tosses him a star and makes him a U.S. Marshal with the assignment of, among other things, tracking down the posse members and bringing them in.

Along the way, Cooper becomes involved with a lovely young storekeeper named Rachel (Inger Stevens), who is searching for the men who murdered her husband and then gang raped her; a crazy-as-a-loon character who keeps screaming about the world coming to an end before his does (Dennis Hopper, in a role so small it makes the ones Eastwood had before A Fistful of Dollars look like leads); and an aging sheriff with a bad back and a liking for the guilty posse men (Charles McGraw).

It’s all very gritty and sun-baked, with Eastwood puffing again on one of those goddamn little cigars he hated so much.

The picture isn’t as frisky as the Italian ones, and while Pat Hingle, Ben Johnson and Charles McGraw are old pros who know just what they’re doing and do it well, there’s no one like Eli Wallach or Lee Van Cleef for Eastwood to bounce off of while showing any humor.

In fact, there’s damn little humor of any sort in the movie.
But it’s a good picture, competently if unimagintively shot, and it takes its genre more seriously than a lot of American westerns did at that time (as if there were a lot of American westerns in the late 1960s).