Hang 'Em High

I've mentioned the Blind Spot blogathon before, where a blogger comes up with a dozen movies that are ostensibly "classic" or "essential" but that the blogger hasn't seen before, and watches them over the course of a year. Not that I take part, mostly because I don't know what movies I'm going to be getting to that far in advance. But one movie that would have been a blind spot was the western Hang 'Em High. So the last time it showed up on TCM I watched it in anticipation of doing a post on it for the next time TCM aired it. That next TCM airing is overnight tonight (or very early tomorrow morning, June 22 depending on your time zone), at 2:00 AM, right after Noir Alley, which means that now is the time to do the post on it.

Clint Eastwood stars as Jed Cooper, a former lawman now hoping to get into ranching in the Oklahoma Territory. He's driving cattle when he's stopped by a group of nine men led by Captain Wilson (Ed Begley). It seems that somebody has been rustling cattle, and Cooper's cattle look like the ones that were rustled. Eventually, Cooper mentions that he has a bill of sale, except that the signature on it doesn't match what the posse knows as the signature of the man who supposedly sold the cattle. Worse, Cooper can't give a proper identification of the man whose signature that's supposed to be. And, the posse know that the man and his wife were murdered. So it's not unreasonably that they think Cooper is guilty. Except that they decide not to bring him in for trial but to hang him on the spot.

Fortunately for Jed, the hanging doesn't quite succeed. Oh, he's hanging from a rope, all right, and it leaves him with a nasty scar on his neck, but it didn't succeed in it stated aim of killing him dead. Another man, Marshal Bliss (Ben Johnson), comes along, and cuts Cooper down. Bliss has to assume that Cooper is a possible criminal, so Bliss puts him in an 1890 version of a paddy wagon and takes him back to Fort Grant, where the judge, Fenton (Pat Hingle) will put Cooper on trial and then execute Cooper after the inevitable guilty verdict.

Except that the real guilty party is found before Cooper can be found guilty and put to death. Cooper is theoretically free to go. Fenton, however, knows that Cooper will simply go on a revenge tour, and doesn't really want that. Fenton is perfectly happy hanging people, he wants it to have a veneer of legality about it so that Oklahoma can eventually become a state. So Fenton strongly suggests that Cooper become a deputy marshal again, and bring in the men who tried to lynch him, only to do it legally, thank you very much. None of that vigilante justice please.

So much of the rest of the movie is Cooper trying to track down the men who came after him, while Wilson and the rest of the posse try to find him first so they can have another crack at eliminating him and not fail this time, since they know that their necks are on the line, too. Along the way, there's also a running subplot involving Rachel (Inger Stevens), one of the women at the local bordello who, like Cooper, has a past of her own. She takes care of Cooper every time the posse catches up with him, nursing him back to health. She also realizes that everybody around has some sort of ghosts in their past.

Hang 'Em High is considered a classic, but I have to admit that I found it surprisingly pedestrian. I think part of that is that there's quite a bit less going on than the script might have you think. But more of it comes down to the direction by Ted Post, who was better known for his work in television. It feels as though Post was thinking that he had more tools at his disposal working in the media of film rather than a cramped TV studio, and decided to use things like zooms and pans as well as the big vistas of widescreen without having any real purpose in using them. That and the slow pace came across as distracting to me.