Hang 'Em High (1968) marked Clint Eastwood's triumphant return to Hollywood: after becoming an international star with the Dollars Trilogy, he proved that his overseas success was no fluke. Unfortunately it's one of Eastwood's most mediocre films, a by-the-numbers Western that plays like an extended television episode.Jed Cooper (Clint Eastwood) is accosted by a posse led by businessman Captain Wilson (Ed Begley) and accused of murdering a rancher; he's hanged and left for dead, until he's rescued by a US marshal (Ben Johnson) who returns him to Fort Grant. Cooper is commissioned as a US Marshal by Judge Fenton (Pat Hingle) to track down the men who tried to kill him. Cooper isn't daunted by the physical challenges of the job, even after transporting one of his attackers (Bruce Dern) across the desert. But he soon realizes that enforcing the law isn't the same as upholding justice, and that he might sacrifice his personal honor for revenge.
Directed by Eastwood's television partner Ted Post, Hang 'Em High is almost painfully formula. Writers Leonard Freeman and Mel Goldberg want to explore the difference between law and justice, showing Cooper trying to square his desire for revenge with his duties as a lawman. This is a perfectly serviceable premise, but Hang 'Em High does nothing more complicated than your average Gunsmoke. The movie tries to introduce complexity by making the lynch mob a mix of respectable citizens and hardened criminals, but that only introduces minor variety to the inevitable shootouts. Jed's arc is painfully predictable, with his disgust over the Judge's highhanded methods paired with a tedious romance with a widow (Inger Stevens) who tries to push him into retirement. Which is predictably for naught: however much Jed gnashes his teeth and growls, in the end A Man's Gotta Do What a Man's Got to Do.
Eastwood's performance is assured: he has a natural movie star charisma that carries over from Sergio Leone's Westerns without difficulty. It seems like a massive in-joke for him to be introduced as a softhearted cattle rancher (he even rescues a calf from a stream) and evolve into a pitiless avenger, commenting on Clint's own Rawhide-to-Fistful evolution. Still, Jed himself is a standard issue Western hero, and while Eastwood's screen presence makes him compelling he doesn't have much depth or originality. You could swap Clint for Audie Murphy or Rory Calhoun and have substantially the same film.
Hang 'Em High used to play constantly on cable, and that's really where it belongs. Besides its TV talent (both writers worked on Hawaii 5-0) the cast is full of familiar faces (Pat Hingle, Ed Begley, Ben Johnson, L.Q. Jones, Bruce Dern, Alan Hale Jr., even a cameo by Dennis Hopper) who all play strictly to type. It's not a bad film, really, it's just lazy and uninspired; undemanding Western fans will find it a passable waste of two hours. And Clint would leverage its box office success into more ambitious and interesting movies.
