Hang 'em High dvd movie.|
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List Price: $14.98 Our Price: $9.99 You Save: $4.99 Features • Anamorphic • Closed-captioned • Color • DVD-Video • Full Screen • Widescreen • NTSC In Theaters : 03 August, 1968 DVD Release : 19 November, 1997 |
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Hang 'em High description After starring in the now-legendary trilogy of spaghetti Westerns for Italian director Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood became a box-office star and imported the style of those classic shoot-'em-ups for this 1967 Western directed by Ted Post, with whom Eastwood had worked during their days on the television series Rawhide. Eastwood plays an innocent rancher who is mistaken for a cattle rustler and sentenced to hang by an angry mob. When he is saved from the noose by a passing lawman, he embarks on a renegade campaign of vengeance against the men who attempted to lynch him. Hang 'Em High offers a number of memorable moments and stylistic flourishes, and features a superb supporting cast of Western veterans, including Ben Johnson, Ed Begley, Pat Hingle, Dennis Hopper, Bruce Dern, L.Q. Jones, and the "Skipper" himself, Alan Hale Jr. Made just three years before Dirty Harry, the film marked a turning point for Eastwood, who would soon move into a prolific period of contemporary thrillers. The digital video disc offers standard and widescreen formats and a remastered soundtrack. --Jeff Shannon |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | Never Hang The Wrong Man...Without Finishing The Job |
| After a few years as Rowdy Yates in the TV series "Rawhide", Clint Eastwood managed to attain international superstardom via the trilogy of wacky, violent Italian spaghetti westerns he made with director Sergio Leone in the mid-1960s. And then in 1968, he returned to America to make his own homegrown sagebrush impact. The end result was HANG 'EM HIGH, a significant box office hit upon its release in the late summer of 1968.
Here, Eastwood portrays a former lawman on a cattle drive through the barren Oklahoma Territory who is set upon by a gang of rustlers, led by Ed Begley, who proceed to string him up for getting those cattle from a ranching family they claim he had murdered. But there are two problems with that: Eastwood wasn't the culprit in those murders; and when they string him up, they don't finish the job. Saved from certain death by a local marshal (Ben Johnson, always that most credible of Western actors), he is then made a federal marshal by the territorial judge (Pat Hingle) and assigned the task of getting the rustlers who tried to kill him, but turning them in alive, so Hingle can try them and then hang 'em--and hang 'em high! Eastwood's thirst for vengeance does not make him a remorseless killing machine, however, since he comes to question Hingle's brand of "justice", and especially after having a fire lit under him by a woman (Inger Stevens) who also wants revenge for her ex-husband having been murdered, possibly by Begley's crew (including Bruce Dern and L.Q. Jones). He happens to show a lot of mercy to an old man (Bob Steele) who had originally been part of Begley's lynching crew because Steele had warned Begley that they hung an innocent man. All of this makes HANG 'EM HIGH stand out. More than a few critics groused upon its release that this movie was merely made to cash in on the Eastwood/Leone films, which racked up big box office in America in 1967. But while there is some of Leone's influence here, HANG 'EM HIGH is not as wacky or violent as those films were. It is a complex and quite thought-provoking meditation on the idea of frontier justice. Contrary to the notion of Eastwood being every bit as staunch a Hollywood conservative as John Wayne, HANG 'EM HIGH shows us, as did Leone, and as Sam Peckinpah would, that the demarcation between good and evil, and right and wrong, is an often thin line that is often crossed. Ted Post, who had directed Eastwood in a few "Rawhide" episodes and made his feature-film directing debut here, sometimes slips in his overuse of the zoom lens and Leone-inspired closeups for certain shock effects (notably the hanging sequences, of which there are plenty, but none shown in ultra-graphic detail). But he does give Eastwood a lot to work with, via the screenplay by producer Leonard Freeman (who later created "Hawaii Five-O"), and Mel Goldberg. Hingle makes for a very cagey judge; and Dern and Jones do the villain parts to a tee. Also featured here are Alan Hale Jr. (much more menacing than his "Skipper" role in "Gilligan's Island" will have you believe), Charles McGraw, Arlene Golonka, and, in a brief but typically flamboyant bit part as a sagebrush religious psychotic, Dennis Hopper. Featuring a good score by Dominic Frontiere (whose main theme would be popularized by Booker T and the MGs later in '68), and shot on location in New Mexico, HANG 'EM HIGH is one of the most underrated films of the Western genre from the 1960s, and marked Eastwood as a very efficient "star", on the verge of becoming one heck of an actor and director to boot as well. |
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