By 1969 Clint Eastwood had cultivated a reputation as Hollywood’s fiercest tough guy. Of course, as Robert De Niro so eloquently puts it in Stardust, reputation takes a lifetime to build and mere seconds to destroy, something Eastwood learned the hard way when he decided to star in a little musical called Paint Your Wagon.
The musical came after Eastwood had already made his name in Sergio Leone’s The Dollars Trilogy: A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The films were made between 1963 and 1966 but weren’t released in the US until 1967. Their success made Eastwood a huge star, and he began playing revised versions of his Man With No Name character in several Hollywood spin-offs, including Hang em’ High.
Paint Your Wagon was a little different. Starring Jean Seberg of Breathless fame and fellow western icon Lee Marvin, the musical was based on the Broadway show of the name and cast Eastwood as Pardner, the survivor of a wagon crash who discovers gold at the funeral of his brother. After they make a new home in the mining camp of ‘No Name City’, a polygamist Mormon arrives looking to sell his wife to the highest bidder.
Eastwood’s singing was widely criticised, and the film ended up being pretty much universally disliked. “I was crazy enough to try anything,” Eastwood told Empire. “I’ve always been interested in music, my father was a singer, and I had some knowledge of it. Although what I was doing in that picture was not singing.”
To be fair to the actor, Eastwood had signed on to the project with high expectations. Sadly, what was initially billed as a gritty musical unlike anything seen before, gradually, through a series of rewrites, the feature became a middle-of-the-road family musical. The actor had been drawn to the project for the daring inter-ethnic romance, but this was quickly removed. Eastwood considered bailing, but the producers proved very convincing. “I was away shooting Where Eagles Dare, and they flew over (Alan Jay Lerner and director Joshua Logan) and talked me back.”
When he returned, the script was “much lighter, it just didn’t have the dynamics that the original script did. And that was another long shoot.” It took six months to get the whole thing wrapped up, by which time Eastwood was very, very fed up. “That was not as pleasant an experience as I was used to,” he said. I imagine he was putting it lightly.