Paint Your Wagon *** (1969, Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood, Jean Seberg) – Classic Movie Review 2183

Director Joshua Logan’s 1969 musical is infamous as the one that got Clint Eastwood singing (‘I Talk to the Trees’) and landed Lee Marvin with a number one UK pop chart hit (‘Wand’rin’ Star’), earning him a gold record.

Frederick Loewe (music) and Alan Jay Lerner (lyrics)’s 1951 Broadway show success becomes a costly, overblown but enjoyable and high, wide and handsome-looking film shot under problematic conditions outdoors among spectacular Oregon scenery as filming went over budget and behind schedule.

The thin wisp of a plot that has to try to fill so much screen time (166 minutes) finds unlikely prospector partners Ben Rumson (Marvin) and Pardner (Eastwood) sharing the same wife Elizabeth (Jean Seberg) while digging for gold in the California gold rush mining country. Incidents include the duo drinking and gambling, hijacking a stage, kidnaping six prostitutes and turning their mining camp into a boom town.

Fortunately, Alan Jay Lerner (in his only film as producer) and director Logan also import some actual skilled show people to their project. Harve Presnell has a real, lovely voice (‘They Call the Wind Maria’) as Rotten Luck Willie and Ray Walston (from Logan’s South Pacific) is a real, amusing comedian as Mad Jack Duncan.

Technically, the movie enjoys some of the best talent money could buy at the time: William A Fraker’s Technicolor cinematography is an outstanding eye-filler.

It was released when musicals were going out of fashion and received many negative reviews. But, thanks mainly to the popularity of Marvin and Eastwood, the movie was a sizeable hit if not the huge box office success that the producers had hoped. And its huge budget of $20million, which made it then the third most expensive film ever made, kept it in the red. In the troubled production, Paramount fired Logan as director after five months of filming with escalating budgetary and production problems, and assistant director Tom Shaw completed the film, uncredited.

A wan and unhappy-seeming Seberg gets only one song – A Million Miles Away Behind the Door (music by André Previn) – and it’s dubbed by Anita Gordon.

Marvin was to star in The Wild Bunch (1969) until Paramount offered him $1million plus a box-office percentage to swap to this. Like his character Ben Rumson, Marvin was allegedly drinking liquor during the film.

The original Broadway production opened at the Shubert Theatre on November 12 1951, running for 289 performances.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2183

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