Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		5.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.5

Paint Your Wagon Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 27, 2024

Quick: name a musical that played on Broadway in the fifties which highlighted a starcrossed romance between two would be partners with differing ethnicities who might be broadly described as either Caucasian or Hispanic / Latino, leading to unforeseen (or, realistically, foreseen) difficulties. Easy, right? West Side Story, of course. Except not in this instance. Lerner and Loewe are one of the most storied writing teams in the annals of American Musical Theatre, though that legendary reputation was really burnished by properties that had their stage or film debuts some years after Paint Your Wagon arrived on Broadway in late 1951, ultimately eking out a one season run of fewer than 300 performances, so not a "blockbuster hit". In fact until My Fair Lady arrived on the Great White Way in 1956, followed by the film Gigi in 1958 and then the Broadway mounting of Camelot in 1960, productions which helped to cement Lerner and Loewe as the primary competitors to Rodgers and Hammerstein, the pair's reputation relied almost entirely on Brigadoon, with Paint Your Wagon's relatively short run doing little to burnish their renown. That may be just one reason why the film version of Paint Your Wagon is markedly different from the original stage conception, including the fact that the film completely jettisoned one of the more interesting subplots of the Broadway (and, later, West End) mountings, namely a romance between the daughter of white gold prospector Ben Rumson (Lee Marvin in the film) and an itinerant Mexican worker who (along with that aforementioned daughter) is nowhere to be found in the 1969 film extravaganza.

Instead, the film completely rejiggers things, moving another subplot of the original stage version, the arrival of a Mormon with two wives, one of whom ultimately ends up with Ben (at least for a little while), into a more prominent position. While Lerner and Loewe would reunite for the 1973 Broadway mounting of Gigi (which kind of remarkably earned them a Tony), and for one final film with the charming if problematic 1974 musicalization of The Little Prince, Loewe considered himself "retired" when Paint Your Wagon finally made it through one of the longer gestational periods of stage to screen "births", leading to a short but rather interesting collaboration between original lyricist and librettist (and co-scenarist with Paddy Chayefsky) Alan Jay Lerner and André Previn, who pretty much simultaneously crafted new songs for this film while also working on the Broadway musical Coco, which, not to be confused with a much later film bearing the same name, famously offered Katharine Hepburn in her sole musical outing as designer Coco Chanel. I'm unapologetically quite fond of all the Previn-Lerner collaborations (despite Hepburn's "singing" voice, I even enjoy the cast recording of Coco), and the new material here is rather artfully woven into pre-existing songs by Lerner and Loewe.

The result is inevitably a bit of a mishmash, with Ben, much as in the original stage version, discovering a gold supply while attempting to bury an unfortunate pioneer, resulting in the pretty much immediate building of a "city" (called No Name City in the film, though it was named after Ben in the original musical). Ben partners with, well, Pardner (Clint Eastwood), a farmer whose brother's death resulted in that aforementioned quickly abandoned burial attempt. The first part of the story details the quick rise of No Name City and focuses exclusively on the town's male population (since there aren't any females). In this regard, one of the film's most distinctive elements is its really stunning array of choral arrangements by Joseph J. Lilley, which features emphases on basses, baritones and lower tenors, rather than what was the more midrange to high tenor "norm" as heard in the wonderful opening wordless vocals in the Overture of another 1969 roadshow musical, Sweet Charity.

Females do ultimately show up, including a bunch of "working women" who populate a saloon/bordello run by Rotten Luck Willie (Harve Presnell, delivering a powerful rendition of one of the musical's best remembered songs, "They Call the Wind Maria"). The central female character is one of those aforementioned Mormon wives, a spunky woman named Elizabeth (Jean Seberg), recovering from the recent loss of a baby, who finds herself sold to Ben, but who soon starts to share romantic longings with Pardner. Meanwhile No Name City may have just as quickly run dry, gold wise, as it initially flowed with, but that leads to a madcap shtick laden finale when Ben wonders what happens to all of the gold dust that falls through the floorboards of various establishments.

Paint Your Wagon featured the reteaming of Lerner and director Joshua Logan, who had previously collaborated on the less than rapturously received Camelot in 1967. Logan typically brought considerable visual interest to his musicals (even if some of that "interest" turned out to be controversial, as with his use of filters in South Pacific), and that's certainly the case with this impressively shot (by William A. Fraker) feature. Nelson Riddle's Oscar nominated orchestrations are also a standout, with some evocative use of harmonica and banjo along with the expected coterie of orchestral forces.

I gave a recap of sorts of what I called the "precipitous decline" in the fortunes of the screen musical from the mid-sixties on in my How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying Blu-ray review, and in terms of what used to be called "roadshow" presentations, Paint Your Wagon was one of the last, lumbering behemoths to market itself that way, to fitful effect. For just one example of how quickly things changed for the musical, one of the many extra trailers included on the 1080 disc is for Two Mules for Sister Sara, the film Shirley MacLaine went on to directly after Sweet Charity (the trailer actually bears the same 1969 production year copyright as Sweet Charity, even if the actual film debuted in 1970). Sweet Charity's press material heralded MacLaine as Hollywood's "new superstar", but the paltry box office performance of the musical perhaps shocked the honchos at Universal, because she is literally unmentioned (aside from a quick on screen credit) in the trailer for Two Mules for Sister Sara. With regard to Sweet Charity, though, it's kind of hilarious that both of these 1969 roadshow properties offer their own version of a "hippie- fied" preacher type.

Paint Your Wagon Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Paint Your Wagon is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Kino Lorber with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. I utilized the 4K UHD release for purposes of this review, and the back cover of that release states this is a "brand new HDR / Dolby Vision master from a 4K scan of the 35mm original camera negative", and even without the blandishments of HDR / Dolby Vision in this 1080 version, the results are pretty spectacular, with the large format source delivering some really fulsome detail levels even in some of the widest shots. Logan was sometimes criticized with a perceived overuse of close-ups (one of the "problems" often mentioned with regard to Camelot), but he and Fraker deliver some generally expert framings here that support really precise detail levels on practical items like sets and costumes, as well as other elements like those bristly muttonchops Lee Marvin sports. If fine detail in particular does enjoy an uptick in Kino Lorber's 4K version, I really don't think anyone is going to be seriously disappointed with detail levels throughout this 1080 version. There is some zoom material that is a bit fuzzy at times, and just a few of the establishing shots, especially in the very early going, don't offer the same robust densities that are frequently on display. As I mention in our 4K review, I frankly found relatively little difference in the palette between the 1080 and 2160 presentation despite the 4K UHD's disc HDR / Dolby Vision, and this 1080 presentation offers some really gorgeous hues in a lot of the outdoor material in particular, where greens are especially resplendent looking, and where the typical Pacific Northwest dreary rain (the film was shot in Baker, Oregon) actually looks rather evocatively beautiful a lot of the time. Grain is very tightly resolved throughout this presentation.

Paint Your Wagon Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Paint Your Wagon features DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 and DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 options. I was frankly initially a little surprised by the 5.1 track because one of my fondest memories of the soundtrack recording was the deliberate separation of all the foreign languages in "I'm On My Way" as the film starts, something I either remember or am making up about my "memories" of having seen this film theatrically with multitrack sound, but all of those voices are pretty much front and center in this version. That passing qualm aside, there's a really appealingly full bodied sound on tap throughout both of these tracks, with the 5.1 version nicely opening up the really sumptuous choral work and in particular Nelson Riddle's fun orchestrations (for some of his arranging expertise, stay tuned through the rather long vocal medley exit music, which has a kind of comically swingin' big band version of "Gold Fever", one of the Previn-Lerner tunes from the score). The glut of outdoor material provides a wealth of ambient environmental sounds which noticeably engage the side and rear channels. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly throughout. Optional English subtitles are available.

Paint Your Wagon Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary by Lee Marvin Biographer Dwayne Epstein, Screenwriter / Author C. Courtney Joyner and Film Historian Henry Parke ( True West Magazine)


• Trailers include Paint Your Wagon (HD; 1:06) along with several other trailers for Kino Lorber releases.

I utilized the 4K UHD release for purposes of this review, but it looks like this standalone 1080 release is packaged with a slipcover.

Paint Your Wagon Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Lovers of musicals would do well to give a listen to the Original Broadway Cast recording of Paint Your Wagon to get some idea of how radically reimagined this property was for its film version. This is big, pretty bawdy, entertainment, and it offers Marvin, Eastwood and Seberg all rather good showcases for their talents (trivia lovers may know that Marvin's rendition of "Wandrin' Star" rather improbably made it to Number 1 on the charts in the UK). Technical merits are solid, and Paint Your Wagon comes Recommended.