Paint Your Wagon Poster

Paint Your Wagon (1969)

Comedy | Musical | Western
Rayting:   6.6/10 12.5K votes
Country: USA
Language: English
Release date: 14 May 1970

Two unlikely prospector partners share the same wife in a California gold rush mining town.

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User Reviews

bkoganbing 9 January 2007

Unfortunately Paint Your Wagon came at a time when big budget musicals were going out of vogue. The expenses of this film nearly bankrupted Paramount and it was many years before the studio recouped its investment. Another big Broadway hit from the same era, Finian's Rainbow also came to the big screen a few years earlier and bombed at the box office.

Paint Your Wagon ran 289 performances for the 1951-1952 season on Broadway. Daring in its time, Paint Your Wagon had an interracial love theme. That was too tame for the newly liberated silver screen from the Code and here we have a woman, Jean Seberg, marrying two gold miners, Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin. This might be the first story on screen about polyandry unless you count Noel Coward's Design for Living and that was a heavily censored version.

Listening to Lee Marvin it sounds like an eminently practical arrangement. Lee saves Clint Eastwood after a fall and nurses him back to health and he makes him a partner. Then he 'buys' at auction Jean Seberg who is the second wife of passing Mormon John Mitchum.

Since Clint's a partner in everything, sharing a wife seems a sensible arrangement. Lee's character Ben Rumson has some very interesting ideas on morality, especially morality out in the wilds. You'll have to see Paint Your Wagon to hear him explain his views.

Jean Seberg's voice is dubbed by Anita Gordon, but Eastwood and Marvin do their own numbers. For Marvin, he does it in the tradition of Rex Harrison and Richard Burton in those other Lerner and Loewe musicals and it comes off nicely. Clint Eastwood's many talents do not include singing however.

But as it turned out Paint Your Wagon needed all the help it could get at the box office. They could have cast a singer in Clint's part, but where was there on who could play the role, be the right age, and bring in the dollars. By 1969 there really was no such male singer in Hollywood. Probably in the fifties someone like Gordon MacRae or Howard Keel might have done it then.

The comedy is pretty raucous from Lee Marvin's original ideas on sex to the whole town caving in because of all the mine tunnels beneath. Paint Your Wagon holds up well and it's not as bad a film as has come down by reputation. It might be painful for Clint Eastwood fans to hear him sing though.

knsevy 26 November 2003

Fmovies: ***SPOILERS, IF ANYONE CARES****

And I HATE musicals!

This film falls in with 'Little Shop of Horrors' and 'The Blues Brothers' in the very short list of musicals I really love.

It's Lee Marvin who makes the film. You could have replaced Eastwood or Seberg with almost any other actor or actress; it's Marvin's performance as Ben Rumson that brings this movie to life. All the way through, his facial expressions communicate volumes about his character - for a quick instance, watch his eyes as he prepares to eulogize Pardner's dead brother in an early scene.

Anyone else could have played Pardner or Elizabeth and done as good a job, but Lee Marvin gave us a Ben Rumson that I don't think anyone could equal. He does more just by his looks and body comedy than could be expected.

If you disagree, please go back and watch what I think is his best scene: Rumson trying to walk nonchalantly away from No Name City as it sinks into the collapsing tunnels he built under it.

A fantastic film. It's only average, if you don't have the capacity to fast-forward through Eastwood's and Seberg's songs.

dane-lucas 24 January 2005

i love this film,

i think it portrays the idea of the last outpost of freedom before 'society' catches up brilliantly. I have always thought this film to be male orientated so maybe this is why it was not successful. Out in 'No Name City' there were no women till Ben hijacked the tarts stage remember. Still there was real camaraderie between the men, even love really when you consider how Ben and Partner shared everything ! But seriously those two men loved each other, speaking as a married non homophobic male I could relate to the affection that they had for each other. Some of us men if we would dare admit it have male friends that we have shared our lives with,laughed and cried with, got blind drunk with, ran from the law with, watched each others backs...etc etc. Great film, great songs 'theres a coach....Moria...get the soap and water...no name city... Full of free spirit, adventure, hope, whisky,women (eventually !) "here it is I mean here it is "

"i give you the boy,give me back the man !"

Debo 30 May 2000

Paint Your Wagon fmovies. Much has been written about how terrible this film is, how it marked the end of both the Western and Musical genres, but to those of us who like both musicals and westerns this movie is a real treat. Clint's vocal stylings do indeed leave something to be desired, but Lee Marvin's talky singing is reminiscent not only of Robert Preston in the Music Man, but to Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady.

But the reason I recommend this movie is that it is dashed funny. Clever, one might say, and not a bit bawdy, in a chaste-by-today's-standards sort of way. I agree that people who don't like musicals--and it's not unreasonable to assume that many Eastwood fans fall into that category--wouldn't enjoy this movie any more than they would enjoy any other movie in which people wander in and out of songs at random. But I do argue that it shouldn't be avoided on reputation. It's divinely amusing.

nixholl 3 December 2004

I first watched Paint your wagon at the age of about ten when my dad who incidentally loves this movie had it on in the lounge. At ten years old it is a film that seems to rather drag and seemed so old to me I could barely watch, but now watching it again many years later have come to appreciate it as quite a comic take on the old west. Its characters are amusing and despite some criticism on clint eastwoods performance as partner i enjoy all the actors performances including his. My favourite song of the film would have to be 'no name city' as i remember as a child being amazed at how low the reverends voice goes during that song. Overall I enjoy this movie and will watch it if it is on television. An 9 out of 10. Good old fashioned fun.

orthogonal6 28 July 2004

Is the movie great? No, but it is a good one. If it were great, it would not suffer from it's long running time. A wider audience would no doubt warm to a shorter version. More is the pity, too, because the movie has much to offer. The scenery is beautiful; the sets reconstructions are first rate. Listen to the lyrics of some of the songs ('Gold Fever' and 'The First Thing You Know' are two good examples) and you can appreciate the wordsmithing skill of Alan Jay Lerner. If you like a large all-male chorus, the film offers some of the best singing of that kind you are likely to hear. Listen especially during 'There's a Coach Coming In'.

I must confess a guilty admiration for characters who are unapologetically amoral and corrupt, at least as defined by 'respectable society'. I wouldn't necessarily want one for a neighbor or even a friend (well .. maybe), but they are fascinating on film or stage. If the film is a comedy, they can be hilarious and often steal the show. All you need is the right actor to fill the role. Paint Your Wagon offers one of the most uproariously amoral characters on film, brought to amazing life by Lee Marvin. He delivers Ben Rumson's imminently quotable home-spun philosophy of life with great relish and comedic timing. Can he sing? No. But then would a somewhat dissipated Gold Rush miner likely be a good singer? His non-singing actually fits.

The rest of the cast is good but not exceptional. Ray Walston is memorable as Mad Jack. I still find it hard to spot the actor I am used to behind the beard and accent. He also has some great lines. Harve Presnell is the only truly major-league singer in the cast and delivers the most memorable song. The remaining actors are adequate. Eastwood is good but replaceable. Jean Seaberg is not Meryl Streep but is certainly easy on the eyes. The townsfolk are solid.

An enjoyable movie, with Lee Marvin's performance worth the price of admission. It is too bad it requires such a long time commitment to experience it all.

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