Suffice to say, this film is not actually about the painting of wagons. No, no. It’s about bisexual bigamy.

Yep.

The plot concerns one Ben Rumson (Marvin), a dromomaniacal prospector. When a pair of farmers’ wagon does fall off the wagon train and off a cliff, one of said farmers does die, he does. The other one is Clint Eastwood, so he survives, otherwise he’d have far too high a billing, albeit with some busted limbs. Ben fixes up the not-dead one and sets to burying the other, only to find that there’s gold in them thar hills. He immediately claims the land for himself and the not-dead one, whom he declares is his ‘pardner’ and whom will largely only be referred to as such for the rest of the damn film. It’s only fair, as after all ol’ Pardner technically found the vein, by crashing his wagon into it. Vertically. And also his brother’s dead or something. All Ben asks is that he stay with him in his tent and help deal with his loneliness and melancholia and all that. *cough* Anyway, it isn’t long before a township builds up around the vein, dubbed No Name City, a town with no women whatsoever but where it’s seemingly impossible to move without copping a feel of another dude. Honestly, they make signpost jokes of likes of ‘population: male’, but it seems the producers missed a trick by not having someone vandalise the sign to say ‘No Dame City’. Bah, I’m doing the job for these people… fifty plus years late. So, yeah, amidst this light homoeroticism, some dang Mormons turn up! Specifically a man and his two, count ‘em, two wives. This doesn’t sit all that well with the townsfolk; why should he get two wives when all the other men in town have approximately none? Fortunately(?), bigamy isn’t legal in California and the wives don’t get on anyway, so the Mormon elder decides to sell one to the highest bidder, because that’s all perfectly acceptable. The second wife, Elizabeth (Jean Seburg), is all for getting out it, because her sister-wife is a cow and her husband rather sucks too. Following the inevitable bidding war, a drunken Ben buys the woman, accidentally blowing all the other bids out of the water. She’s not entirely thrilled by the winner, but, eh, she’ll take it, so long as he agrees to treat her like the lady what she is. And he largely does. Yay. They fall in love a bit. Inevitably, the other men come sniffing around the only woman in town though. Ben realises that there’s only one solution! Kidnap some whores and set up a brothel in town! Tongue-clicks of disapproval with this plan soon dissipate when the townsfolk realise that if they have ladies like that, well, they’ll need a fancy establishment to deal with the business side, and a fancy establishment to deal in finery for them, and like a saloon and a casino and all those sorts of things that menfolk who come to town might like, and if it’s successful, it’ll need more of even those things. So Ben leaves Pardner to guard Elizabeth while he and a posse go off to abduct women. Unfortunately, while guarding her from other men, they fall in love a bit too, but fortunately, Liz has the perfect solution to the problem.

Of that plot synopsis above, about two non-consecutive lines of the first four apparently apply to the original stage version, and not even all of those. This film uses only really the very basic setup and then goes off on its own thing; the stage version mostly revolves around Ben’s daughter Jennifer and her romance with the discriminated against Mexican gold miner Julio. Some character names you’ll notice I didn’t mention above there. That’s because they’re not in the film at all, not even mentioned like. Plot-wise, essentially pretty much everything after the discovery of gold, and a fair bit before, is entirely new. The polyamory stuff that’s like the main thrust (ooh, er, etc., etc.) of the film is not a thing. A bunch of the songs also got replaced or recontextualised as well, given as the places they were supposed to be were, you know, not there anymore. Too bad for the show’s fans, but then again it was nearly twenty years old by this point and deemed rather a disappointment, so maybe it didn’t have any. Certainly, I expect that that gave Lerner the confidence to pretty much rebuild the whole thing from scratch… albeit without Loewe, who’d retired in 1960 and apparently wasn’t willing to come out of it to whip up some new music here.**

I suppose it was probably a bit late though. The big Hollywood musical was dying in the latter half of the ‘60s, though the studios were apparently in denial about this and scrambling to make them in wake of the success of things like Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady (both 1964) and The Sound of Music (1965). I’ve brought it up elsewhere, but Lindsay Ellis has a sizable video essay on the demise of the Hollywood musical and the roadshow in the ‘60s. Paint your Wagon was, as ever, part of this trend. Despite its reputation, it was seemingly nowhere near the biggest box office disaster of that particular period in film history, but at the same time, it features a lot of the common problems its contemporaries as well as some weirdness all of its own that makes it hard to believe that anyone thought that it could be successful, rousingly so or otherwise.

It'd been some fifteen years since Calamity Jane (1953), so I guess we were due another queer cowpoke musical. Also, we’re well overdue another one. Your move, Hollywood! But that particular digression aside, with its requisite over-inflated budget and not at all subtle sexual theme (even if you ignore or are oblivious to the homoerotic subtext, you sweet summer child, you, it doesn’t really change the bigamy and sex work text elements) that reportedly made it the first roadshow musical to not get an ‘all ages’ type rating from the fledgeling MPAA ratings board, coupled with the fact that the genre as a whole was struggling, it’s all seems a rather doomed enterprise. I suppose fair play to them for going for it; the Production Code was finally dead, so they were free to try and do something different, but it was likely at once too bawdy for the ostensibly ‘high class’ patrons of cinematic roadshows, while still too old-fashioned to be of much interest the younger audiences with their Bonnie and Clydes and Easy Riders and such.

I guess I’m not really talking much about the film from any technical standpoint. It’s all thoroughly competent for the most part. It generally looks nice enough. It generally sounds nice enough. There are some weird creative decisions, like some of the shittiest day for night shooting I’ve seen, how it just seems to gloss over the men actually falling in love with Jean Seberg’s character. Some poor use of montage there. Speaking of, Seberg, one of the great icons on the Nouvelle Vague, is a weird casting choice, isn’t it?

Generally, it’s just a rather weird film. It is however well worth seeing. For one thing, there are certainly worse of its type. It doesn’t all work, but it’s decently amusing in parts, and its utter brazenness, considering when it was made, renders it sort of compelling. It probably shouldn’t exist, but I kind of like that it does.

* Ponderosa pine, oo-ooh!

** In case you were wondering, the other Lerner & Loewe adaptations of the ‘60s, My Fair Lady (1964), Camelot (1967) and another version of Brigadoon (1966), didn’t add any original songs. Loewe did come out of retirement to write, with Lerner, songs for The Little Prince (1974) though.

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