From the 1960s: Paint Your Wagon

1969 Musical Comedy

From Paramount Pictures

Directed by Joshua Logan

Starring

Lee Marvin

Clint Eastwood

Jean Seberg

Harve Presnell

Ray Walston

It was a bomb some said.   Some of the critics were most unkind but in large part they sided with Paramount whose gates this film practically closed.  When a runaway production happens, when budgets are seemingly forgotten, when production schedules are not adhered to, every studio in town helps badmouth the movie.  (Think Heaven's Gate, 11 years later, that suffered a similar fate and like Paint Your Wagon, is not nearly as bad as all the naysayers said.) 

I never saw it as a bomb.  It is over-produced at times and too long but what I saw on the screen was gorgeous, as energetic as a film can be and just plain good fun.  But then faithful readers know there aren't too many musicals I dislike or for that matter too many westerns and here we have both.  And c'mon now, what do I care of the financial waste and a director's inability to reign in his runaway production? 

There were some issues, however.  It stars three actors not known to be singers and includes too many songs that didn't generate much interest.  It annoyed religious folks because at its center is a ménage á trois, a marriage involving two husbands and a wife.  And they cried out that if a musical isn't safe for family viewing, what would be?

Probably as much as anything, the age of the big musicals had passed and with the Vietnam War raging and great unrest in the country, apparently no one was rapturous about an overlong, unimportant musical about life in an 1840s gold mining camp. 

But the 60s was a very long time ago.  When I watched it yesterday, I'll tell you I couldn't think of anything I'd rather be doing.  I couldn't get over the gorgeous camerawork and locations, again hearing three songs I've always loved and hearing and watching Lee Marvin's craziness, a young and handsome Clint Eastwood and his lowkey singing and the luminous beauty of Jean Seberg.

I've always loved the opening of this film and generally rewind it a couple of times.  It starts with a dark drawing of a procession of miners on their way to a camp.  As the drawing gets lighter, a chorale says GOLD several times and toward the end the word is being sung.  As the credits begin to roll, with great panache comes the title song sung by the same male voices... got a dream, boy, got a song, paint your wagon and come along.

The story is not complicated.  A grizzled itinerant prospector (Marvin) forms an unexpected partnership with a former Michigan farmer (Eastwood) in a thriving camp with a sign that reads:

No Name City

Population: Male

Actually it seems that there are a few hundred males spread across both sides of a stream.  There are mostly tents but as the film goes on buildings are constructed.  We are clear that there are only two things that interest these men... finding gold and finding women.

The latter happens on a day when Mormons show up unexpectedly... a preacher, his wife, their baby and his second wife (Seberg).  She is not happy with their arrangement and easily agrees to be auctioned off and somehow, Marvin, drunker than usual, shouts out he'll double the last offer and that gets him a wife he never wanted.

The general population was not pleased that such a fetching lass would go to such a dirtbag.  She also finds out he has a lanky, handsome partner and within a short time, they are involved in a three-way marriage.  She spends private time with them individually.  Again, no one seems to pay any mind.  But Marvin thinks the townsfolk, friends one and all, would benefit if a new business could just open to help the population with its frustrations.

The scene of Marvin bringing six prostitutes into town showcases my favorite ditty... There's a Coach Coming In.  Yes, yes, here's a another time for endless rewinding.  The choreography and the staging of this number, the camera setups, the editing, the playfulness of boys being boys, the various singers (most all of the male voices are supplied by the Roger Wagner Chorale), the energizing tune allows for one of my favorite production numbers, a big undertaking.  This vast canvas of men washing up in the stream is contrasted with the galloping good humor of Marvin handling the coach with its team of six fiery horses and six women being thrown every which way in the open coach on its way into town. 

Here's that musical interlude for you.  It provides a look that captures the entire movie:

The third song that I like, the most famous of this collection, is They Call the Wind Maria, sung by Harve Presnell while we witness more incredible cinematography and set designs and featuring some serious wind and rain.  I'm always reminded of how unappealing I would find goldmining to be in the 1840s.  Maybe it's just me.

Eastwood and Marvin do their own singing.  Marvin's songs are all comic ones to allow for his drunken behavior which he's very good at delivering. In one of them he is accompanied by The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.  Eastwood, who was not pleased with his decision to do the film (he wanted to branch out), referred to it as Cat Ballou II.  I get it.

Eastwood's simple, lowkey, not-much-range is actually pleasant in three songs... I Still See Elisa, I Talk to the Trees and Gold Fever.  Seberg's only song, A Million Miles Away Behind the Door, is dubbed.  Walston sings a little in a couple of group songs and is vastly underused.

I loved the outrageous comedy of the finale where the entire town collapses because the miners have dug a long tunnel directly under the town's many buildings.  Set designer John Truscott built the entire set on an elaborate and ungodly expensive system of hydraulic lifts and rockers.  The saloon set alone cost $300,000 to rig.   What I saw (thanks again to some tight editing) was some seriously funny stuff.

The film ends as it should.  Pleasantly.

Lerner & Loewe's Paint Your Wagon got its start on Broadway in 1951 and closed eight months later after 289 performances.  The pair was responsible for the Broadway musicals My Fair Lady, Brigadoon and Camelot and the film Gigi.  The Wagon rights were bought by Louis B. Mayer, the former leader of the mighty MGM, but it came to naught.  The same could be said of the next purchaser, singer Eddie Fisher, although he tried very hard to get a movie version off the ground.  He did link up with Paramount and the studio stayed after Fisher left the project.

Fisher had been big on hiring Gene Kelly to direct but Paramount wanted Josh Logan who was hired.  In addition to his Broadway successes he had directed such films as Picnic, Bus Stop, Sayonara and Fanny and the musicals South Pacific and Camelot.  While there's a dash of spottiness in there, most were big moneymakers and there was no reason to think Paint Your Wagon wouldn't follow suit.

Lerner became the film's producer and the thorn in Logan's side.  The script is from Lerner who adapted Paddy Chayefsky's original script.  Andre Previn was brought in to write some extra songs.  Several songs from the Broadway production were omitted and much of the story was highly revised for the movie version.

Logan, from almost day one, would consider working on Paint Your Wagon as the worst experience of his career.  Most of it had to do with the constant, stultifying presence and interference of Lerner.  The two had also worked together on the film version of Camelot but Logan said he rarely saw the producer.  Logan would go on to say he never worked with anyone so troublesome which is quite the mouthful considering he worked with Monroe, Brando, Chevalier and Richard Harris.

The movie was filmed two hours outside of Baker, Oregon in an area called East Eagle Creek in the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest because it had everything they were looking for except accommodations for the large cast and crew whose most important members were flown by helicopter a total of four hours every day for months.  The cost for these flights is said to have been thousands a day not to mention housing for six months.

Not everyone was housed in town.  Because so many male extras were needed, word was put out all over Baker and surrounding areas and many hundreds, most of them hippies and bikers, answered the call.  At night most slept in their own tents or sleeping bags near the set.

There are those who certainly thought the manic-depressive Logan was either responsible for the whole mess or certainly was as much as Lerner.  There was a time, early on, that the main actors thought Logan just shut down and was barely going through the motions of directing.  He certainly got most of the blame for the financial woes while in his memoir Logan claims he was always warning others about the spiraling costs.  Eventually he got so worn down by all the fighting with Lerner and the general mayhem that he walked off the picture five weeks before the filming completed and he never made another movie.

Joshua Logan

There are instances when I like that trained and famous singers are not hired to be in musicals (and sometimes I definitely do not like it).  Lerner and Logan had done it earlier for Camelot when Richard Harris, Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero raised their voices in song.  Here is more of that. 

The man in charge at Paramount insisted on Marvin.  As Eastwood certainly alluded to, he would never have been given a thought had it not been for Cat Ballou.  When they agreed to pay him a million dollars and give him top billing, he signed on without reading the script.  He gave up the starring role in The Wild Bunch to make Paint Your Wagon. 

It's probably a good thing he was playing a drunk because he was more often than not drunk while filming.  They had to do a lot of clever things to make him look and sound like he does on the screen.  It was not easy.  He was often apologetic and would come to the set the next day, sober or nearly so, and able to pull off his actorly tricks to perfection.  He was apparently popular with one and all.  

Marvin recorded Wanderin' Star from the film as a single in the U.K. and it knocked the Beatles out of first place on the charts.  I ain't makin' this stuff up.

While this is the most unusual movie Eastwood ever acted in, perhaps only his diehard fans recall that he made an album some years earlier called Rawhide's Clint Eastwood Sings Cowboy Favorites.  And while he didn't exactly jump at the first offer to make this movie, he ultimately accepted because he wanted to sing in a film.

Secondly, he very much like Chayefsky's script which he found kind of dark.  He thought that darkness might bring to musicals what Sergio Leone's darkness brought to westerns.  But by the time he got Chayefsky's finished script, Lerner had hacked away at most of it and Eastwood didn't like what he saw but it was too late to back out, though he tried.

Eastwood, whose company Malpaso was co-producing, did his best to remove himself from all the ruckus on the set.  In the beginning he gave suggestions but when they were largely ignored, he decided to do the same.  He went fishing with some of the locals and rode his motorcycle whenever he could.  But mostly he hung out with Seberg.

Eastwood, who was married at the time but involved in a long affair, was allegedly enjoying one of his numerous on-set affairs with someone in the crew.  But about Seberg he apparently said I was kind of nuts about her.  It wasn't just her exceptionable beauty and the way she zeroed in on a man who interested her, it was her fragility and vulnerability.  She seemed like she needed protection from the big bad world.  That is exactly how I felt about her... it was exactly as I had felt earlier about Monroe.  I thought Seberg looked so wan and sad in this film.

Despite the tenderness of their affair, it was reported that when the company returned to Paramount for a few interior shots (they actually had to rebuild the saloon... oh those costs!), Eastwood virtually ignored Seberg which she not only couldn't understand but it sent her already fragile ego plummeting.

When the story is focusing on Eastwood and Seberg, it seems like a different film.  Their romantic passages brought a calm, even an innocence, to the otherwise chaotic production and the raucous storyline.  

Eastwood credits his experience on Paint Your Wagon with pushing him toward directing and with Malpaso backing most of his future films, he would have more say-so.  He knew he never wanted to ever have the experience he had making this film on another one.

He called the wind Maria

Marvin either received good notices or bad ones.  There didn't seem to be much middle.  I'm on the side of good.  I thought he was delightful.  Most reviewers dismissed Eastwood's and Seberg's performances as bland.  Harve Presnell, who had his 15 minutes of fame five years earlier in The Unsinkable Molly Brown, was almost an extra here.  

I was mightily impressed with the many extras playing the rowdy miners.  The film also had approximately 250 people as part of the crew.

Fifteen million was earmarked for the production but it came in closer to 20 million.  That's not good... ever.  Going wildly over budget and shooting beyond the time originally proposed, having director problems and logistical nightmares and headlines about how badly things are going taints a film, sometimes forever.  

One critic's complaint was that is was all so unrealistic.  He must have been new at his job asking for realism in a musical-comedy.

After The Sound of Music in 1965, Hollywood went nutty over its success and it was going to have musicals, musicals, musicals.  And they came... Darling Lili, Star!, Dr. Doolittle, The Happiest Millionaire, Finian's Rainbow, Goodbye Mr. Chips... and all had poor showings.  Interestingly, several were also troubled productions. 

Paramount, of course, was so nervous.  It wasn't quite the bomb that was anticipated with ticket buyers.  It fell five million short of what it cost to make but more damage was expected that never came.  It wouldn't be long before the studio made Love Story and The Godfather and the whining vanished.

Next posting:

Well, while we're in Oregon...