They riddled him with bullets. They strung him up. They left him to die. But they made two fatal mistakes: they hanged the wrong man…and they didn’t finish the job. In his first American-made western, Clint Eastwood indelibly carves his niche as the quintessential tough guycool-headed, iron-willed and unrelenting in his pursuit of revenge. Oklahoma, 1873. Jed Cooper (Eastwood), mistaken for a rustler and killer, is lynched on the spot by crooked lawman Captain Wilson (Ed Begley) and a rampaging band of vigilantes. But as Wilson and his gang flee the scene, there’s one very important detail they’ve overlooked: Cooper is still alive! Out for justiceand vengeanceCooper takes on the job of deputy marshal…and, one by one, tracks down the nine men who “done him wrong.”After starring in the now-legendary trilogy of spaghetti Westerns for Italian director Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood became a box-office star and imported the style of those classic shoot-’em-ups for this 1967 Western directed by Ted Post, with whom Eastwood had worked during their days on the television series Rawhide. Eastwood plays an innocent rancher who is mistaken for a cattle rustler and sentenced to hang by an angry mob. When he is saved from the noose by a passing lawman, he embarks on a renegade campaign of vengeance against the men who attempted to lynch him. Hang ‘Em High offers a number of memorable moments and stylistic flourishes, and features a superb supporting cast of Western veterans, including Ben Johnson, Ed Begley, Pat Hingle, Dennis Hopper, Bruce Dern, L.Q. Jones, and the “Skipper” himself, Alan Hale Jr. Made just three years before Dirty Harry, the film marked a turning point for Eastwood, who would soon move into a prolific period of contemporary thrillers. –Jeff Shannon
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March 5, 2010
#1
Boring and predictable. A let-down after the trilogy and the High Plains Drifter.
March 5, 2010
#2
I’VE SAW THIS MOVIE SOOO MANY TIMES IT DOES NOTHING BUT GET BETTER WITH EVER SHOWING!!!!! EASTWOOD IS BY FAR ONE OF THE BEST WESTERN SUPERSTARS TO DATE. DON’T KNOW OF A BAD WESTERN THIS MAN HAS MADE!!!! SO TREAT YOURSELF TO A REAL SHOOTEM’ UP WESTERN WATCH HANG’EM HIGH OVER&OVER&OVER AGAIN. AS WITH ANY EASTWOOD MOVIE YOU CAN’T WATCH IT JUST ONCE. THERES SO MUCH ACTION GOING ON YOU HAVE TO SEE IT A COUPLE OF TIMES TO CATCH ALL THE ACTION.. SO HAPPY VEIWING.
March 5, 2010
#3
it was when the mass hanging scene was stupidly inserted two , not just one, long church hymns, with a cardboard-like preacher on the gallows to conduct the crowd to sing them, and a condemned-by-hanging rapist kept monologuing about 10 minuntes to synchronize those two hymns, this movie was beginning to fall flat miserably.
the other ridiculous and illogic part was when the marshal escorted the two young rustlers and that murderer back to where the hanging judge resided, why he suddenly had to take a route across a vast desert instead of going back by the original path where the posse came from? there’s no way and no excuse to make such stupid arrangement simply just because the director and the screenplay writers wanted to show how difficult and tough the marshal got to do a heroic dead-man-walking mission, then turned himself out for the next lame a-hero-was-born scene.
there were wonderful moments of this film, but it started to drag along and lag behind gradually. it often gave you an impression that both the screen writers and the director didn’t have a clue how to make this movie going, they could only asked clint eastwood, the marshal, to do lot of unnecessary hollow scenes.
March 5, 2010
#4
Not your average garden variety revenge-
Western either. Eastwood did act WELL in
here, not just got through the motions
like in High Plains Drifter (**) and aw-
ful Beguiled (*.5), or even worse ‘Un-
forgiven’ (*.5). Pat Hingle, also a vet
of four Hawai’i 5-0 episodes did well in
here as ‘Hang’Em High’ judge who gives
Clint his Sherrif star. Stevens, who be-
came a nut later is good in here, too.
March 5, 2010
#5
I reckon I’d really like to have seen this movie directed by Sergio Leone and the score written by Ennio Morricone. As it is, it just doesn’t pack the wallop or capture the grandeur of the “spaghetti” westerns and is one of my least favorite westerns. The score alone is enought to make me gag; it could have been written for some cheesy made-for-TV movie or even one of the later Gunsmoke episodes. Clint does a decent enough job but doesn’t look nearly as tough without a beard. The script is predictable and just doesn’t have any air of mystery about it like Eastwood’s previous work. A real disappointment.