Review of Paint Your Wagon (1969) by Anthony K — 03 Feb 2017

I'm not a musical buff. Hell, I would even hesitate to call myself a movie buff. Last time I checked my RT counter, I've only seen about a thousand movies in total. Subtract that from the literal millions of titles out there and I've only taken a chip off the crust. But, what I lack in breadth of knowledge, I like to think I make up for in willingness to taste almost any flavor of movie out there. I'll scoop up mid-90s rom-coms, French New Wave, and so-bad-its-good Asylum fare in equal (okay, maybe not equal) portions. For that reason I dove into this oft forgotten late-60s musical question mark starring everyone's favorite tune-belting duo, Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood. Yes, they actually sing in this movie. Yes, it's actually as bad as you think.

First, this is an exceedingly ugly film. The tone straddles somewhere between slapstick camp tongue-biting satire, but you wouldn't know that looking at the dreary sets caked in gray-black muck and sapped of all warmth as if a dementor leaned in and kissed all life out of the production design. Blame the iron fist control of writer (yes, writer) Alan Jay Lerner, who essentially seized control of the picture from day one, demanding (among other things) that the movie needed to shoot on location in the middle of nowhere Oregon literally a forty-five mile dirt road trek from the nearest hotel. $20 million was a lot of money back in the day, and a majority of that budget went to building and maintaining these soul-sucking sets as far away from the reach of man as the filmmakers could muster, while flying in Mr. Eastwood via chopper every morning. But I digress. Paramount threw a bunch of money down the drain here.

Then there's the questionable, ad hoc decision to make this a musical. Yes, it was based on Lerner and Loewe's Broadway play of the same name (also a notorious flop), but the songs seem out of place and none are particularly noteworthy except in how mind-numbingly bad they are. If you want a good laugh, watch Lee Marvin mumble-growl his way through "Wandering Star" or the only decent singer belt out his pet names for the wind and rain like anyone asked him.

Finally, the story itself is a bit of a headscratcher. Prospectors in 1849 California sing their way through the construction of a gold rush town while kidnapping and fighting over women like toilet paper in a post-apocalypse (except with severe rape overtones). Meanwhile Marvin and Eastwood enter into a ménage à trois marriage with a woman they bought (Jean Seberg) and she falls for both of them (Stockholm syndrome much?). To cap it all off, our heroes dig under the town to collect the gold shavings that fall through the floorboards. To what end? I really couldn't tell you.

It's hard to know who this movie was made for. It has all the trappings of a quick, ill-advised cash grab in the wake of West Side Story and The Sound of Music. At the same time though, it feels like too many hands tried to pull it in creatively dissonant directions. Having read Paint Your Wagon's "making of" story in James Robert Parish's "Fiasco," most of the blame seems to lay Lerner's back. Being a control freak, he stepped on so many toes that the creative direction of the film spiraled out of control. That's not to say that it would have been better with his noninterference, but if he'd stayed at the sidelines, he wouldn't have been such an easy scapegoat.

And finally, this movie commits the biggest cardinal sin in my book. It's boring. Wrechedly, paint-dryingly, grass-growingly, cobweb-collectingly boring. You're better off watching ten hours of Nicolas Cage freaking out on YouTube. Okay, maybe nine. It isn't THAT bad. 3.7/10.