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Somehow, it’s comforting that Clint Eastwood is finally back home again. He blew up almost every single low-budget venue in Spain, southern Italy, and Sicily for “A Fistful of Dollars” and its two sequels. The Man With No Name could be found anywhere there was a chance to hire extras for fifty cents a day.
Supporting actors in these Italian productions did not speak English well, which is perhaps a prerequisite in the original West. They were filthy, sweaty, vicious, and profane, always scratching themselves and spitting everywhere.
What a disaster! What a mess! Sergio Leone, the Italian director responsible for the sweat, scab, and beer style of Westerns, liked to dwell in frightful close-ups of grotesque wounds and sadistic grins. His favorite angle was interested camera position behind a boot while Clint Eastwood was receiving a kick.
But now Eastwood has made it big and when Hollywood gets him back in “Hang ‘Em High” he knows he is back home. You can tell it’s a Hollywood Western because Ed Begley is shaking his fist at the hero before the titles and Inger Stevens resides in the boarding house.
Like most Americans, I too have concluded that Ed Begley is in every film that has ever been made and the one starring Inger Stevens is part of every other Western that is made. In my view, Begley is a national landmark, and an accent mark, because he is a character actor to marvel at, and you would not believe it was a real Western town if he did not live there.
Miss Stevens, on the other hand, seems to have perfected the role of the boarding house mistress. In “Firecreek”, she was a widow boarding house proprietoress, and in “Five Card Stud” a lady barber and boarding house proprietoress with a heart of gold. This time she boards in the boarding house. In all cases, she gets, as she always does, at least one chance to sit at the bedside of the man in question and bring him back to life.
Like in the case of the Italian Westerns, “Hang ’em High” is in the tradition of revenge stories. Eastwood’s character is almost lynched by a mob headed by Begley. He is cut down and vows to take revenge. He is given a badge by the kind of hanging judge in town played by Pat Hingle. The judge does this in order to keep the townspeople from further lynching him, and then starts in on his own executive action. Eastwood, alive and well, gladly set out to collect enough scabs, blisters, scars, and rope burns to satisfy the sadomasochist criteria set by Leone.
He does a decent job. Begley and Stevens add tone to the cast, and Hingle comes over like an extremely earnest Karl Malden. Its moral is vaguely anti-death penalty and for you people who love that thin, wind-blown guitar twanging, there is plenty of that thin, windblown guitar twanging as well.
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