Hang 'Em High

1968's HANG 'EM HIGH was Clint Eastwood's first Hollywood Western after achieving superstar status in Sergio Leone's "spaghetti" epics.  This film, directed by TV vet and Eastwood stableman Ted Post, at times tries to ape that style.  With what I consider to be intermittent success.   It is front and center obvious with those (sometimes awkward) camera zooms and Dominic Frontiere's scoring, a decent attempt at capturing the Ennio Morricone elan.  Such efforts don't entirely work.   But if United Artists wanted to try, let 'em.   The film was a box office success. 

The set up promises a straightforward tale of vengeance.  Jed Cooper (Eastwood) is left to swing from a tree after a posse of nine decides he murdered the man whose cattle he was found herding across a river.  Frontier justice?  A Federal Marshall happens along and cuts the noose just in time, and Cooper is brought before Judge Adam Fenton (Pat Hingle) of the Oklahoma territory, who determines his innocence and lets him go.  But he knows a vengeful soul when he sees one, and warns the man that he'll hang from one of his famous six gallows if he's caught playing vigilante.  The solution: hire Jed Cooper as a Marshal, not too much of a stretch as the stranger held a badge some time earlier.  Does Jed accept the job simply to even the score and move on, or to resume a career calling?

I have to hand it to screenwriters Leonard Freeman and Mel Goldberg - they take a basic idea and develop it far beyond what I would've expected.  Things get downright complicated, though not necessarily complex.  The story adds numerous characters and plot entanglements along the way as Jed begins his hunt.   One is a young woman named Rachel (Inger Stevens) on a bitter mission of her own.  Others include a pair of teenage rustlers who get involved with Miller (Bruce Dern), one of those dirty nine, in another rustling incident.  And a backwater sheriff  named Ray Calhoun (Charles McGraw) who suffers a bad back and is even friends with some of that posse.. 

All of this adds to what I consider an overlong runtime, though shorter than the typical Leone pic, which certainly had their own convoluted plots.  The late romance between Jed and Rachel also feels a bit like padding.  Most intriguing was the thread involving the political machinations of Judge Fenton, who in a climactic scene explains his view of law and order and justice and their inevitable shortcomings.  Someone who was more than ready to oversee a territory that was sure to soon become a United State, with a real governor and everything. 

My description probably tipped you off that HANG 'EM HIGH is not just another shoot 'em up.  There's precious little of that, but plenty of the patented Eastwood persona.