Reader Recommendation: Hang 'Em High (1968)

Back when I first started watching movies for this blog, I burned through the Man with No Name trilogy in a single week. In the comments of A Fistful of Dollars a reader who only identified themselves as "Z" suggested that if I liked those, I should watch Hang 'Em High, another Clint Eastwood western. Does it stand up compared to his other westerns? Hit the jump for my impressions.


Eastwood stars as cattle-hand Jed Cooper who is wrongly lynched and left to die right at the start of the movie. Saved by a passing Federal Marshal and proved innocent in a court of law, he becomes a Marshall himself to find the men who wrongly took the law into their own hands. The result of his near death encounter leave him with a scar of a cut on his cheek, and more noticeably, a large scar around his throat left by the hanging rope. There's also a beautiful blond woman who oddly checks every new prisoner who comes into town, never saying a word.

The story is fairly straight forward, find the men who attacked him. As I suppose is likely to happen to a Federal Marshall in those days however, he keeps getting side-tracked by other criminals and the duty of bringing them back to the main town for trail. He has a few run-ins with the men he's looking for once his name becomes well known and they hear he's looking for them. There's a few turns in the plot, including the side story with the mysterious woman in town, but I found it largely unimportant to the story and seemed simply like a series of detours always distracting the story from what was most interesting to me.

Jed Cooper always gets his man

There was a surprising lack of action as far as I was concerned. Most of movie is actually closer to a drama it seemed than a western. I suppose it was somewhat interesting to see Eastwood as a Marshall and dealing out the law arresting people. But most of his targets actually come along quite quietly. To be honest, I found myself just on the edge of boredom a few times, mainly that was from the stupid side story with the blond woman though.

All in all, I'd have to say this doesn't really hold up compared to the likes of For A Few Dollars More or The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. It had some interesting points contained within concerning the guilt of a man, but the ratio of talking to action was totally in the wrong direction for my tastes. It wasn't bad, certainly not. It's not even the worst of the ones I've seen, it just wasn't what I was hoping for. If you want to see a Clint Eastwood western, I'd point you in the direction of one of the 2 I mentioned in this paragraph first before this one.