dcshanno

'Hang 'Em High' gets off to a great start, but after a set of fantastic opening titles, the movie quickly becomes 'Leone Lite.' Literal in its approach but rambling in structure, 'Hang 'Em High' begins with the premise that Clint Eastwood will go out and seek revenge on the men who nearly killed him. And, well, for the next hour and forty-five minutes or so, that's pretty exactly what you see him do. In between rounds of 'justice,' the film gets bogged down with preachy passages condemning the rigidity of capital punishment and a half-baked subplot/love interest that doesn't begin until the film is nearly over and then doesn't amount to much. It was cheaply made with obvious painted backdrops outside open doorways and noticeably redressed sets. Also, it was sloppily assembled – look for the film equipment under the hangman's scaffold.

To compound things, the men Eastwood is out to get really aren't that bad. By and large, the posse that strung him up at the beginning did so only because they believed he was the man responsible for the killing of a well-respected rancher and his wife and a personal friend to most of the posse's members. With a few exceptions, the men were guilty of little more than overreacting and punishing the wrong person but doing so with honorable intentions. They should have been paid for this, but, frankly, I just never felt they deserved what they got.

Eastwood had obviously picked up a thing or two from Sergio Leone, and it shows in this bleak, violent, and absurd Western. But whereas Leone's 'Man with No Name' was a likable purveyor of death and vengeance, Eastwood's 'The Stranger' is so menacing and cruel that he's rendered completely unsympathetic from the get go. While I enjoyed some of the film's more surreal moments (painting the town red and the apocalyptic finale), Eastwood goes too far in trying not to take his character seriously and turns him into a nearly cartoonish comic book figure. When he tosses the dynamite into the hotel room and then guns everybody down, about the only thing missing was a 'Yippee-ki-yay, motherf*cker' or 'I'll be back' type quip.

I'm sure there are those who prefer action over art and gritty realism over style, but I'll take 'A Fistful of Dollars' over 'High Plains Drifter' any day.

The mega-stars of the old studio era are usually remembered for the iconic films they starred in: Humphrey Bogart and 'Casablanca,' Katharine Hepburn and 'The Philadelphia Story,' Jimmy Stewart and 'It's a Wonderful Life.' When you come across a title in a star's resume that you've never heard of, it usually means that it's a lesser, forgettable film. And this is the case for "In Name Only" for both Cary Grant and Carole Lombard.

This is a minor, sudsy weeper that only moves from plot point to plot point because the characters don't do or say the things they should in order to extract themselves from their predicaments. By the time the film comes to an end with the doctor explaining the importance of having a positive psychological outlook in order to combat pneumonia, I had lost interest and was actively wishing the movie would end.