HANG 'EM HIGH

The opening scene to this 1968 Western starring Clint Eastwood is terrific.  Eastwood's character (Cooper) is wrongly accused of murder and theft by an angry lynch mob, who ignore his protestations and string him up on the nearest tree, leaving him for dead.

Fortunately a Marshal is riding by (the always great Ben Johnson), who is able to cut him down and resuscitate him.

Cooper will have to stand trial, except that his innocence is quickly established, and the judge for the entire Oklahoma Territory offers him a job of Marshal.  Cooper accepts simply so he now has the authority of the law in pursuing the nine members of the lynch mob.

So everything looks well set up for an exciting revenge narrative.

However the film only partially delivers on this promise, down to the direction, cinematography and music being undistinguished, and to a meandering screenplay that goes off in some odd and unsatisfying directions.

For example, there is an ongoing tension between Cooper and the judge, which just seemed to get in the way.  Amusingly, given Eastwood's later Dirty Harry persona, Cooper is a stickler for due process and justice, even at one stage demanding written witness statements.  The judge on the other hand is known as a hanging judge for good reason, which he justifies on the grounds that if the public's demand for a good hanging isn't satisfied then they will lose faith in the justice system.

This tension reaches a sort of climax in perhaps the film's best scene, of the hanging of several criminals, including two young lads who Cooper strongly feels don't deserve to be executed.  Weirdly though, Cooper abandons viewing the hanging so as to spend time at the local whorehouse.

There's also an unconvincing and half-baked romance of sorts between Cooper and a widow who is seeking revenge on the the men who killed her husband and then raped her.  It's another storyline which doesn't go anywhere interesting.

This was Eastwood's first American film after making the 'Dollars Trilogy' with Sergio Leone, and it is clearly intended to be an American attempt at a 'Spaghetti Western' (an 'Apple Pie Western' as one critic called it). It seems that audiences and critics alike were simply very happy to have Clint home again, because it was a big commercial hit and it scores 92% on Rotten Tomatoes.  

Given its multiple problems (including one of the least convincing fistfights I've ever seen) I have to wonder how many people back in 1968 left the cinema satisfied, and how many critics today would give it a high rating.