Review: Joshua Logan’s Paint Your Wagon on KL Studio Classics 4K UHD Blu-ray

Joshua Logan’s Paint Your Wagon can be viewed as one of the last gasps of a dwindling Hollywood studio system, as well as a precursor to the New Hollywood. The film, with its expansive anamorphic vistas of the American Northwest, bears some superficial similarities to Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, which is often historicized as the end of the New Hollywood, given how it bankrupted United Artists. But in contrast to the profound sadness with which Cimino regards America’s history of violence, Logan’s musical romp takes a lighthearted approach to the process of resettlement, and it’s propelled by the contrasting personalities of Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood as bickering and tussling gold prospectors.

Paint Your Wagon straddles multiple genres at once, suggesting something like a western-inflected musical riff on Ernst Lubitsch’s Design for Living. The crux of the story concerns Ben Rumson (Marvin), a ne’er-do-well with a taste for getting “boiled” at the local saloon. Following a wagon accident, in which one of two adult riders is killed, Rumson takes in the severely injured “Pardner” (Eastwood), and decides to build a town on unoccupied land after gold dust is discovered on it during the other man’s funeral. The new town, No-Name City, is populated only by men until Elizabeth (Jean Seberg) arrives and is sold to Ben, the highest bidder, by her Mormon husband (John Mitchum). Over time, Elizabeth comes to love both Ben and Pardner, so she poses a question: “If a Mormon man can have two wives, why can’t a woman have two husbands?”

The film, adapted by Paddy Chayefsky from the 1951 musical by Lerner and Loewe, features 14 numbers strewn across its nearly three-hour runtime (André Previn was enlisted by Lerner to provide additional melodies). Several of the songs are intimate and mostly shot in a series of close-ups, as is the early “I Still See Elsa,” which features Pardner sitting on a log, playing the guitar, and singing to himself. Others, like “Wand’rin’ Star,” move across the expansive sets through a series of tracking shots as Ben sings in grumbling baritone. Excepting those involving Harve Presnell, whose Rotten Luck Willie belts out his tunes more in the style of Lerner and Loewe’s classic My Fair Lady, there’s a grizzled, nearly mumbling demeanor to how the cast sings multiple songs, and almost all of them lack any form of elaborate dance.

Paint Your Wagon is a bedroom farce at heart, with Ben and Pardner vying for the same woman while the other men of No-Name City—feral but good-natured laborers—lament not having a woman of their own. Logan’s direction, especially in its enthusiastic framing of the film’s lusty men, recalls the ribald tenor of Roger Vadim’s Barbarella, released the year prior in 1968, which was also criticized around the time of release for its uneven pacing and dubious sexual politics. Even if those gripes are legitimate to some extent, there’s a strange and untamed quality to these films that makes them unique and refreshing, especially in contrast to much of the sanitized and puritanical junk that studios would release over the next 50-plus years.

Image/Sound

In Dolby Vision HDR, the image on this release of the film boasts a remarkable sense of depth, contrast, and clarity. The greens and browns of the Oregon forests are varied and multifaceted, while the blacks are rich and the whites appropriately bright. The detailing of costuming, skin tones, and the production design could hardly be more vibrant. There are two audio tracks on this release: English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0. The former has the better dynamic field, namely for the way it opens up many of the musical and action sequences, but the intricacies of the sound design, especially during the wagon crash, are equally effective on the latter, and dialogue is consistently clear on both tracks.

Extras

Aside from a trailer for Paint Your Wagon and other titles in Kino Lorber’s library, the only other extra is a feature-length commentary track by Lee Marvin biographer Dwayne Epstein, author and screenwriter C. Courtney Joyner, and film historian Henry Parke. The trio cover a remarkable amount of ground throughout the track, from comparing Paint Your Wagon to other musicals, to discussing how much of Paddy Chayefsky’s dialogue made it into the finished film, to considering Lee Marvin’s varying levels of sobriety throughout the production. Furthermore, they discuss other casting possibilities and comparable Paramount projects from around the same era, such as the Julie Andrews-starring Darling Lili, which was a much bigger financial failure, despite having a lower budget, than Paint Your Wagon.

Overall

With this 4K UHD of Paint Your Wagon, Kino Lorber offers viewers the chance to evaluate Joshua Logan’s maligned western musical anew in a sparkling, definitive transfer.