If i'm not mistaken, Ted Post was chosen because he had a relationship with Eastwood on 'Rawhide'.
That's completely correct, Mississippi. Eastwood knew and had worked with most of the other directors proposed by United Artists, but he insisted on Post because he felt very comfortable with him. Many directors (including some who had directed notable movies) cycled through
Rawhide over the years, but Post was probably Eastwood's favorite. Plus, Post thought highly of the
Hang 'Em High script.
I don't know if a Western constituted Eastwood's only possible means of receiving backing from a major studio for a starring vehicle at that time, but it might have been the only possibility—and it certainly represented his easiest and most evident path. The only question, then, was what kind of Western Eastwood would choose—an expensive yet thematically empty extravaganza like
Mackenna's Gold or something with some character challenges and thematic depth such as
Hang 'Em High. Eastwood obviously opted for the latter, even at the cost of a budget that, as you indicated, proved low by Hollywood's standards (higher, of course, than the budget for the first two Leone movies,
A Fistful of Dollars and
For a Few Dollars More, which were produced without a cent of Hollywood capital, but lower than the budget for
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly). Exploring a concern for justice in the Western was nothing new, but
Hang 'Em High offered a chance to reveal the hypocrisies, contradictions, and false dichotomies of frontier justice on a multilayered basis that most Westerns never even approached.
In the seventies and eighties, interviewers sometimes asked Eastwood why African-Americans tended to be such enthusiastic supporters of his movies. I'm struck that one of the reasons is that, from the beginning of his starring roles in American films and his Malpaso films, Eastwood selected movies that questioned the 'system' in a way that most white Americans, and most films generally, did not. Black Americans and other minority citizens, of course, were always more skeptical of the American system (at least in its practice, as opposed to its potential) because the pervasiveness of prejudice and bigotry rendered its inequities far more transparent to their eyes. Obviously, greater skepticism began to creep into American culture in the late sixties, but even so,
Hang 'Em High and
Coogan's Bluff (both made in 1967 and released in 1968) were a little ahead of the curve, at least as far as mere genre movies were concerned. And clearly, Eastwood was attracted to such subversive and iconoclastic themes from the beginning, building on the general attitude of cynicism and revisionism that he had absorbed (and helped project) from the Leone Westerns.
Of course,
Coogan's Bluff (despite some flaws) was also ahead of the curve from an aesthetic and 'cinematic' perspective, whereas
Hang 'Em High, despite the occasional newfangled flourish, proved fairly regressive stylistically ("the look and feel of a TV Western"). In Don Siegel on
Coogan's Bluff, Eastwood found an American version of what he had enjoyed in Europe with Sergio Leone, namely a stylistically dynamic director with whom Eastwood would make groundbreaking and iconic films of major (if initially fairly lowbrow) cultural significance. For instance, in J. Hoberman's
The Dream Life: Movies, Media and the Mythology of the Sixties (2003), the former
Village Voice critic extensively discusses
Coogan's Bluff and
Dirty Harry (along with Eastwood's self-directed
High Plains Drifter), while also discussing the Leone Westerns in general on multiple occasions. (Obviously, his book extends through the early 1970s.)
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