OP, here.
As I am wont to do around imdb, I was cruising this page and found this thread years after I started it. What a good read from a lot of good commenters. I wanted to check in a bit on things:
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Eastwood, when he finally saw the new version, was stunned: "I get this thing, and I start reading it, and it's now totally different. It has no relation to the original, except the names of the characters. They had the threesome deal, but it wasn't a dark story at all. It was all fluffy. Fluffy, and running around talking, and they're having Lee do Cat Ballou II" (Schickel 214). Eastwood scrambled to exercise his escape clause, but by then, for all intents and purposes, it was too late.
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I don't have the Schickel book handy, but I recall Eastwood's quote about talking to his agents after reading the new script and saying "Get me out of this. Get me absolutely, completely out of this." But evidently the contract was binding and he was advised that screwing up such a big budget project so early in his AMERICAN movie career could hurt his career IN Hollywood.
So Eastwood's participation in this project was very grudging, but like good actors, he did the work. (Schickel suggested his performance revealed Eastwood literaly withdrawing from the project ON SCREEN..underplaying to nothingness. But he holds the screen.)
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The bottom line is that the raw material of Paint Your Wagon, with its themes of avarice, scarcity, hardship, and reversed polygamy, seems quite potent and could indeed have made for a dark, potentially revisionist, and quite possibly memorable musical.
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Funny thing is: I think the work as we have it IS still a fairly dark and revisionist musical. With a strong sexual charge reflective of 1969's new rating system. This was an "M"(PG), not an "R" but we here have a three-way marriage, the hijacking of 6 hookers to service about 150 men; a young man's introduction to cigars, whiskey and hookers (in that order; he notes "the first two were good, but the last one was the best!") I saw "Paint Your Wagon" about three times; on one of them we took our grandmother and she freaked out when a drunken Marvin tore the blouse of his new wife Seberg down to a very bosomy status("Filth!") and then Seberg aimed a gun at Marvin's genitals to fend him off. Oops. Sorry, grandma.
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What if the producers had stuck to Chayefsky's screenplay and hired, say, Don Siegel (who worked well with both Eastwood and the notoriously difficult Lee Marvin) as the director? As a low-budget action specialist, Siegel would have seemed an odd choice for an expansive musical, but maybe he could have brought the kind of taut, bitter edge that the raw material called for.
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I believe that the Schickel book notes that Eastwood was pretty disgusted with the indecision and "foo foo manner" of the experienced musical director Josh Logan(well past Logan's prime) and sought to have him replaced not with Eastwood's pal Siegel but with Richard Brooks, who had done The Professionals with Lee Marvin and might be able to tamp down Marvin's real-life drunkeness on the set of Paint Your Wagon.
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How about a similar scene between Eastwood, Marvin, and Jean Seberg in Paint Your Wagon? I don't mean that Eastwood and Marvin should have been directly involved with one another in a homosexual way, but imagine Seberg "working on" Eastwood and then turning over to the other side of the bed and "working on" Marvin.
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I guess because Paint Your Wagon was intended as "an expensive family muscial" with a sexual undercurrent for "dad" (and growing boys -- hence the scene with the young man's sexual indoctrination), nobody had the guts to stage such a sequence, just to leave it "on the imagination's table". But I'd say this: simply by casting the two macho men and the sexy Seberg, the fillmakers planted your scene above in our MINDS. Personally I think the marriage played out just that way. For a time. Then Seberg found her morals.
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Maybe it really could have been a dark, scandalous, groundbreaking Western or Western musical. But again, we'll never know. It's just a bit of a shame that such potent material never realized its potential.
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True. And that we lost a Paddy Chayefsky script. He wrote so few, and they were all great. BUT...I, personally like Paint Your Wagon for exactly what it is(Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood sharing the screen...I'm glad we got them at least ONCE together)... for its songs(the new ones by Andre Previn are pretty snappy, psuedo-gospel rock toe-tappers)...and for the fondest memories about the world at the time of its release at Christmas of 1969.
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As it stands, Paint Your Wagon is sort of a fun curiosity, an experiment that doesn't really succeed but contains some intrigue. (The last time that I watched the film, in May 2002, I felt that it remained respectable over its first half before falling apart in frivolity over the course of its second half).
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Its a musical with a sense of the "hip." The emphasis on a camp full of men carries just the most minimal of homosexual charges(the great dance number "Hand Me Down That Can of Beans" has all the men of the camp dancing together -- just for the joy of it), and shifts to the carnal realities of "men needing women"(only Jean Seberg and six hookers can be brought; as Marvin and Eastwood share Seberg, the rest of the men share the six). However the sex and marriage might be solved in real life(heading out to get more women; domesticating themselves, dispersing), the movie makes a case for what a civilization needs TO domesticate.
As for the comedy of the second half, I recall being impressed by that at the time. As a young viewer, I usually found musicals like The Sound of Music and My Fair Lady to be pretty dull; the songs were good, the stories just sort of concluded. (Even the harrowing escape from the Nazis story in Music.)
But here was Paint Your Wagon laying the groundwork for a "disaster movie finale" in which all of No Name City collapsed into the ground(no CGI, all with real sets) and Lee Marvin led the comedy capers of the finale in a "Mad, Mad, World" mode. I hadn't gotten THAT in a musical. I was entertained. ...I was young.
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The film does benefit from its authentic Oregon locations,
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That's where a lot of the money went and I can only point and say "look what they used to pay for to give audiences a spectacle" back then. Moreover, the Oregon locations are often photographed under heavy rain and mist, and the No Name City streets are buried in mud. "Paint Your Wagon" thus plays as an oddly moody and melancholy musical...it has a sad heart.
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and ecarle's point about Eastwood's change of pace is notable. His acting skills were never as narrow and insensitive as the critics imagined.
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I think so. He rarely acted without a gun or his fists as part of the action. But on the few times where he did, he demonstrated some range and presence. Again, Pardner just doesn't seem like a Clint Eastwood role at all.
BTW, I was thinking that the psycho-female-stalker thriller "Play Misty for Me" was one where Clint didn't use his fists(he played a modern day Carmel ladies-man DJ), but he DID: punching out the psycho female stalker.
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