More than 60 years since their release, all three movies in Clint Eastwood’s “The Man with No Name Trilogy” remain classics. 1964’s A Fistful of Dollars, 1965’s For a Few Dollars More, and 1996’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly are all Italian-made films by director Sergio Leone set in the American West, hence the nickname “Spaghetti Western.” They also challenged the definition of a Western by introducing more grit and moral ambiguity than the American Westerns of earlier decades.
They are so successful that they overshadow Eastwood’s very next Western after completing the trilogy, a movie that is every bit as good as the Man with No Name movies. It’s also a film that’s entirely free to stream on YouTube.
Hang ‘Em High
Hang ‘Em High is a 1968 Western directed by Ted Post, written by Leonard Freeman and Mel Goldberg, and produced by Eastwood himself. The Man with No Name movies made Eastwood a star, so he used some of that clout to begin to exercise his muscle as a filmmaker. He personally chose Post, who he worked with on the TV show Rawhide (1959), to direct, and Eastwood also made script changes to Hang ‘Em High to flesh out his character. Eastwood didn’t direct a movie himself until a few years later, but Hang ‘Em High is a milestone on his path to becoming one of America’s great directors.
The movie is set in the Oklahoma territory back in 1889, before Oklahoma became a state. Eastwood plays Jed Cooper, an ex-lawman who came out to the Oklahoma territory for a quiet life as a rancher. That solitude is interrupted though when a posse shows up and accuses him of killing another rancher and stealing his cattle. The posse then hangs him from a tree, but Cooper survives the lynching.
From there, the story is all about Cooper getting revenge. He becomes a lawman once again at the behest of Judge Fenton (Pat Hingle), a no-nonsense judge with a reputation for sending men to their death. But when Fenton’s bloodlust is even too much for Cooper, the two men are put at odds.
Why Hang ‘Em High is a Clint Eastwood classic
Unlike the mysterious Man with No Name that Eastwood was most associated with at the time, Cooper is more sympathetic and morally complex. Even when he’s at his most brutal, you understand why given what he’s been through. Hingle, who might be best known for playing Commissioner Gordon in the 1980s/1990s Batman movies, is especially interesting, too. He’s not just some evil, soulless magistrate. Judge Fenton is trying to put Oklahoma in the best possible position for statehood so that the people there can live safely, and he earnestly believes his ruthless approach is the correct way to do that.
Hang ‘Em High is a tale about morality, justice, and right-and-wrong, but not a simple one. The movie doesn’t have clear-cut answers, it merely raises questions without offering clear-cut answers, causing you to think about the movie long afterwards. Both Cooper and Fenton are deeply human characters with their own sympathies and complexities. It’s also a tremendously entertaining and surprisingly violent film for the era. As you might imagine, there’s quite a bit of people being hanged in this movie.
While far from Clint Eastwood’ best-known Western, Hang ‘Em High is an important one in his career. It showed the public he could play characters that were more sympathetic than The Man with No Name. More importantly, it started Eastwood on the path to becoming great, thoughtful filmmaker who would go on to specialize in small, morally complex movies with interesting characters. Hang ‘Em High is also free to watch on YouTube at the moment, which means now is the perfect time to familiarize yourself with this underrecognized, underremembered film.
Hang ‘Em High is free to stream on YouTube.