- Title: Hang ‘Em High
- IMDb: link
Flashback Friday takes us back to the Old West. Set in the middle of Clint Eastwood‘s cowboy phase, Hang ‘Em High starred Eastwood as a rancher who becomes a hanging victim, then a criminal, then a marshal, then a vigilante, and then back to a marshal again. A few years after completing the Man with No Name Trilogy and before High Plains Drifter and The Outlaw Josey Wales, the film doesn’t rank among the best of Eastwood’s time in the genre taking a little too long to get the lynched man, wrongly assumed guilty by a posse and left for dead, back on the road of vengeance and revenge.
The film includes Inger Stevens as a somewhat inexplicable love interest but is more notable for Eastwood’s desire for vengeance and his conflict with Judge Adam Fenton (Pat Hingle) who gives him the authority of the law to get justice but whose draconian methods he quickly bristles under. The film was a commercial success and earned mostly positive reviews (although certain aspects of the film haven’t aged as well as others).
Hang ‘Em High works as a B-movie western about frontier justice, although the story of the wronged man out for revenge was played out more successfully by Eastwood in both High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider. It also lacks a true villain as the posse who mistook Eastwood for a cattle rustler and murder are ashamed of their actions (going so far as to bribe the law man back to a status quo and only go out for blood when no peace can be reached). The film has been released on home video several times over the years and is currently available on a variety of streaming platforms.
