Leone

if you had no prior knowledge of this movie, i'd swear you think this movie was from the 1950's due to its style and quality.

you'd be shocked this movie came out in 1968, the same year "coogan's bluff" came out and just 3 years before "dirty harry" came out.

also, this movie doesn't rely on thrilling gun battles like the leone trilogy does. i think jed cooper only shoots one guy, and that's near the beginning of the movie. rather, it relies on suspense and a good, thought-provoking story.

the poor quality and lack of shooting is probably what turns most fans of the leone trilogy away from this one.

I understand what you're saying, cougar, but there are some qualities that distinguish Hang 'em High as a Western from the late 1960s as opposed to an earlier era. First, there's the gritty tone and sometimes grubby appearance. Second, the violence level is much higher than that of a 1950s Western. In fact, when Hang 'em High hit theaters in August 1968, Time magazine labeled it "the year's grisliest movie," and both Time and The Los Angeles Times contexutalized the film in terms of the year's social violence, particularly the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Although it may be tame by today's standards, back in 1968, a few critics deemed the film excessively or distastefully violent and yet another sign of the increasingly and disturbingly bloody times. In fact, some critics believed that Hang 'em High was a spaghetti Western in disguise (in part because of Eastwood's presence and his recent run in spaghetti Westerns). Dominic Frontiere's score takes on Ennio Morricone-type tones at various points, and director Ted Post's extensive (and effective) use of dramatic zooms is a technique that dominated late 1960s filmmaking, but not the 1950s. As for Jed Cooper, he shoots a couple more miscreants late in the film during the "haunted house" sequence. For all these reasons, Hang 'em High emerges as a product of the late 1960s, and audiences embraced it readily. In fact, Eastwood's first American Western actually returned $666,000 more in domestic theatrical rentals to United Artists than did The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

http://www.boxofficereport.com/database/1967.shtml

http://www.boxofficereport.com/database/1968.shtml

Is is true, of course, that Hang 'em High lacks the visual naturalism of the Leone movies or the revisionist Westerns that would be directed by Sam Peckinpah, George Roy Hill, Arthur Penn, Robert Altman, and Clint Eastwood (and even Don Siegel, Robert Aldrich, Mark Rydell, and John Sturges) in the coming few years. However, those films represented the top of the genre's line during the late 1960s and 1970s. There are many other Westerns from that era that share Hang 'em High's somewhat artificial appearance. Indeed, rather than the 1950s, I think that it would be more appropriate to say that Hang 'em High featured a television sensibility. In other words, in addition to the Leone influence, the film owes its existence to the television series Westerns that remained popular through the early 1970s. That, of course, should be unsurprising given that both producer/writer Leonard Freeman and director Ted Post had their roots in TV. Remember, too, that the late 1960s featured a certain schism in American popular culture, with the influence of the old and the new both being felt. In effect, Hang 'em High straddles the fence, with one foot in the violent Leone universe and the other in tacky yet tidy American television.

So in summation, I do think that Hang 'em High is representative of 1968, and a resort to the film's reviews will prove that. However, it is also true that the movie reflects a television influence and thus lacks the newfangled hipness that marked the Leone Westerns and Coogan's Bluff (Don Siegel, 1968). Indeed, Siegel helped Eastwood find the dynamically raw physical and psychological landscape that he needed in American cinema.

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