Clint Eastwood names his most overrated movie: “A lot of people thought it was the greatest”
There was a period in the late 1960s and early ‘70s when it seemed that Clint Eastwood could do no wrong.
He reached the pinnacle of Hollywood by way of Italy when he starred in a tiny-budgeted trio of spaghetti westerns from a then-unknown director named Sergio Leone, whose Dollars Trilogy was an unexpected international goddamn sensation, turning him into an A-list leading man almost overnight.
Hollywood is prone to fuckups, especially when it comes to reshaping internationally successful actors and filmmakers to fit its very particular brand of cinema, but Eastwood appeared to defy the trend right out of the gate with the success of Hang ‘Em High, but as usual, the executives overplayed their hand, and thinking that they had stumbled upon a cinematic messiah, they decided to use Eastwood to save two struggling Hollywood genres – the western and the big-budget musical, and what followed was a film that Eastwood would come to believe was one of his worst.
Paint Your Wagon was based on a Broadway musical by Lerner and Loewe, the partnership behind such theatrical hits as Camelot, My Fair Lady, and Brigadoon, and even though they were a hit-making machine, nothing about their track record or the musical itself suggested that Eastwood, who was the consummate 1960s monosyllabic anti-hero, was a good fit.
No one seemed bothered by this, though, and apparently no one thought to ask whether he could sing. They created a new leading role, brought in Academy Award winner Paddy Chayefsky to write the adaptation, and shipped Jean Seberg back from Paris, where she had been the face of the French New Wave, to star opposite the ‘Man with No Name’.
The production was shambolic from the start, because while director Joshua Logan had won a Pulitzer Prize for co-writing the musical South Pacific, which is an impressive bullet point to have on your CV, it did not translate to wrangling a large cast and crew in a western shot on location in rural Oregon. Tempers flared, budgets ballooned, and Eastwood and Seberg had a very noisy affair. It was a big, Hollywood-coloured mess, and the icing on the cake was that Eastwood could not, in fact, sing.
In an interview with the Rolling Stone journalist Paul Nelson years later, the star conceded in his typical understated fashion that the production had been “tough”. Even though the film had fared relatively well at the box office, it was a flop when compared with its outsized budget. “It wasn’t that it was a bad movie,” he insisted. “A lot of people just thought it was the greatest.”
Eastwood’s statements are a lot less humble than they sound. Paint Your Wagon received only tepid reviews, with most critics barely mustering enough enthusiasm to call it “amiable”. It isn’t clear who Eastwood was talking about, but it wasn’t the critics. He used the experience as fuel to get his own production company off the ground once and for all.
He began to seek out projects that complicated his image as the’ Man with No Name’, which eventually led him to films like The Beguiled, Play Misty for Me, and Dirty Harry.
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Clint Eastwood Newsletter
All the latest stories about Clint Eastwood from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.