Hang 'Em High

I've got multiple movies on my DVR that are coming up on TCM in the next few days, and I haven't watched all of them yet to do reviews on here. Regardless, the first of those movies is Hang 'Em High, which will be on overnight tonight at 1:45 AM (which, of course, is still late this evening out on the west coast).

Clint Eastwood, fresh off his success in the so-called "Dollars" trilogy, plays Jed Cooper, a would-be rancher in Oklahoma just after the land rush. He's bought some cattle and has the receipt to prove it, but is stopped by a group of men who know that the cattle's previous owner had been killed and the cattle rustled; they determine not that Cooper had the bad luck to buy the cattle from the murderer, but that he's actually the killer himself. So the men, led by Captain Wilson (Ed Begley) resort to immediate justice, putting a noose around Cooper's neck and startling Cooper's horse away, leaving Cooper to hang until he is dead, dead, dead.

Except that none of these people are professional hangmen, so the positioning of the noose only results in a lingering death unlike the near-instantaneous breaking of the neck that professional hangman is supposed to achieve. This means that when the next person, Marshall Bliss (Ben Johnson), shows up on the scene, Cooper is still not dead. Bliss puts Cooper in the 19th century old west version of a paddy wagon, and takes Cooper back to the territorial courthouse.

Cooper is in a bit of luck, as he comes before Judge Fenton (Pat Hingle), who has a reputation for being a hanging judge but in this one case is able to determine that Cooper is in fact innocent. The bad news, however, is that Fenton isn't about to let Cooper go free, willy-nilly. If he did that, Cooper would obviously hunt down the men in the posse who hanged him and kill them all. Instead, Fenton is insistent that this be done judicially, probably because he wants to be the one to have the men hanged, and not just see them shot in some distant backwater. With that in mind, Fenton suggests that Cooper become a marshal himself, especially since he had already been a lawman before coming to Oklahoma.

Cooper, not really having much choice, accepts. But as part of his search for the other men, he comes across a man and two adolescent boys who have rustled cattle and killed a man. Even though only the adult, and not the two teens, killed the guy, Cooper returns to town and sees Fenton display a blood lust that won't admit any dissenting voice, and certainly not Cooper's plea for the two boys. Instead, Fenton schedules a mass hanging which is sure to turn into a circus.

Meanwhile, Wilson and the rest of his posse have cottoned on to the fact that Cooper is trying to arrest them, not having died, so they're going to try to kill Cooper, and this time make certain that he's really most sincerely dead. This will lead to the ultimate showdown between Cooper and Wilson....

Hang 'Em High is a movie that feels like there's nothing terribly original going on, while at the same time being a movie that's very competently made. Eastwood does a good job, helped out by a cast of mostly character actors, along with a few people who would go on to become much bigger. Pretty much everybody is solid, with Hingle as the judge having the biggest of the supporting roles.

Hollywood made a lot of westerns in the 1950s and 1960s; for whatever reason many of them, even the ones that were A movies at the time, are relatively forgotten. I'd guess it's that the spaghetti westerns and then The Wild Bunch at the end of the decade changed the genre. But if Hang 'Em High weren't an important film in the career of Clint Eastwood, I think it's another one that would have fallen through the cracks. And that would have been a shame, because it, and a lot of the other westerns, don't deserve that fate.