Paint Your Wagon (1969)
(YouTube Streaming, December 2022) There’s no shame in admitting that my inner conception of a western musical comedy called Paint Your Wagon was influenced by The Simpsons imagining a film in which Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin indeed spent their time painting wagons. While singing. The real film, however, is even stranger. After meeting in strange circumstances, two men team up when a gold rush city springs up. Not even a woman (Jean Seberg) comes between them—this being budding 1969 New Hollywood, the three end up in a menage-a-trois household and the city grows larger and larger. Before long, Eastwood is walking through the wood while crooning a ballad (he’s understandably not much of a singer) and a plan is hatched to provide the male miners with “companionship” even if it means diverting a stagecoach. But the best plan is yet to come, as a subterranean caper is planned to reach and siphon off the gold dust that disappears between the planks of the local saloon. It all culminates in one of the largest comic set-pieces in film history—the destruction of an entire boom town when the tunnels start collapsing, bringing the buildings down. There are a lot of very wrong things about this film as shown—the length, the lack of comic verve, the miscasting of Eastwood, the slack rhythm, the mismatch between large-scale mayhem and character beats—and even more wrongness in the film’s production history (so much so that the already-high budget of the film doubled between approval and completion). But they will never take away the wild widescreen finale in which the entire town collapses around our main characters. In the end, “painting your wagon” means “getting things done,” and not seeing Marvin and Eastwood literally painting wagons doesn’t negate that the film is one wild ride that could only have been produced in 1969. Marvin is terrific; some of the musical numbers are pretty good; and that finale is wonderful. Slickly assembled from bits that should not be together, Paint Your Wagon is all kinds of misshapen… but it’s a great deal of fun.