Paint Your Wagon (1969)

 

When a wagon crashes into a ravine, prospector Ben Rumson recovers two men from the wreckage.  One is injured, while the other is dead.

While burying the latter man, gold dust is found at the grave site.  Ben stakes a claim on the land and adopts the injured man as his "pardner".  The other man is initially sceptical of the clearly rascally Ben, but the older man promises that while he will fight, steal, and cheat at cards, he will never betray and partner.  The two men soon become fast friends who have each other's backs in every situation.

The duo, and many other prospectors, become citizens of a ramshackle tent town where alcohol and cards are their only companions.  Tensions rise at the lack of female companionship, and the arrival of a Mormon with two wives brings the issue to a head.  The miners persuade their visitor to auction off one of his wives, and it is Ben who makes the winning bid.

Ben and Pardner have shared every part of their lives, but surely a wife is one thing they cannot share, right?

Based on the stage musical of the same name, Paint Your Wagon got the green light for production because Paramount's owner had squandered the opportunity to produce smash hit Funny Girl, and was desperate to make a big budget musical of his own.

Like a lot of productions inspired by vanity, the film careered off its financial rails.  Initially budgeted for $10 million, it ballooned to costing double that much.  This price ticket that meant that even after becoming the 7th highest grossing film, of the year, it still lost millions of dollars.

Honestly, it's hard to imagine the line of thinking that led to this investment.  A long (over two-and-half hour) musical with mediocre songs and a trio of leads who either weren't trained singers (Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood) or simply refused to sing at all and had to be dubbed (Jean Seberg) is not an obvious tent-pole around which to build your brand, but that's what Paramount tried to do, in the opening move of a strategy that quickly flamed out in financial failure.

The careers of Eastwood and Marvin weren't impacted by the film's failure, however.  Seberg's, too, might have recovered, but the following year she became the target of a deliberate campaign of defamation and harassment by the FBI, which objected to her financial support of civil rights groups.  She would die only a decade later.

As far as this movie goes, though, "mediocre songs" is to my mind the film's biggest failing.  I'll forgive a musical a lot if I find the songs catchy and memorable, but - with the possible exception of Lee Marvin's so-bad-its-good rendition of "I Was Born Under a Wanderin' Star" - the film fails to deliver.

To be fair, the comedy bits of the film do generally work better than the music does; there are some fun moments of banter, and Marvin shows an aptitude for physical comedy.  Perhaps, it significantly slimmed down and re-written to focus on opportunities the snappy dialogue, a good film could actually have come out of this.

That's not what happened, though.