Lisa Marie asked me to review Paint Your Wagon for Clint Eastwood’s birthday and, being a good sister, I agreed.  I have to learn to stop doing that.

Paint Your Wagon is a musical western starring a bunch of people who have done a lot of westerns but who still have no business singing, at least not in a movie.  If they want to sing in private, that’s fine.  Ben Rumson (Lee Marvin) and “Pardner” (Clint Eastwood) discover gold in a muddy creek and soon, the incredibly ugly town of No Name City springs up.  Because everyone in the town is a dude, everyone’s really lonely.  Then a Mormon shows up with two wives and the miners convince him to sell his youngest wife, Elizabeth (Jean Seberg) to the highest bidder.  Ben is always drunk but he still manages to buy Elizabeth.  Elizabeth says that she’s not going to marry Ben unless he builds her a cabin and also lets her marry Pardner as well.   Hello, polyamory. Eventually, a bull gets loose in the mines underneath No Name City and the entire town collapses but that’s okay because it was an ugly town and no one’s going to miss it.  Ben sings about how he was born under a wandering star so that means he can’t stay very long in once place, even if he does have a polyamorous marriage to look forward to.  Pardner sings that he likes to talk to the trees so he doesn’t need a town to live in.

My first thought on Paint Your Wagon is that it was really, really long.  It had a two and a half hour running time but it felt more like five or six.  My second thought is that movie looked really bad, like it was filmed through a mud filter.  It wasn’t just the buildings in the town that looked bad.  The entire movie looked dirty, oppressive, and depressing.  I like my musicals to have more color to them.  This movie looked like it needed an antibiotic.  My third thought was that, for a musical, none of the songs made much of an impression.  After the movie was over, I didn’t find myself humming any of them.  I can’t even remember what most of them were about.  Even if they had been better, Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood shouldn’t have been singing them.  Lee Marvin’s singing voice sounded like whiskey being poured out over cement.  Clint Eastwood’s voice was thin and he got stuck with all the sappy songs.  I’ll take old and grumpy Clint Eastwood over singing and sappy Clint Eastwood any day.  This was like watching a community theater production where you’re not supposed to care about how bad the performance is because you know everyone in the cast.  Finally, I thought that there wasn’t enough wagon painting.  The entire town was unpainted.  It wasn’t just the wagon that was being neglected.

The funniest thing about this movie is that was advertised as being “the comedy goldmine of 69.”  Nice.

I didn’t like Paint Your Wagon but don’t worry.  I’ll be watching Trouble With The Curve later today.  Now that one, I do like!