The film begins brilliantly and brutally with a lynch mob leaving Eastwood for dead at the end of a rope...
He is rescued, eventually cleared of suspicion, and appointed deputy with 'a license to hunt' by a famous hanging-Judge Parker (Pat Hingle) with a clear warning: All the criminals are to be taken alive for trial...
Eastwood proceeds to clean up the worst crimes in the state, but doubting his own motives, he always avoids capturing the gang of nine vigilantes who were responsible for his near-death...
Inexorably, the confrontation comes nearer. The leader of the gang, Captain Wilson (played by Ed Begley), returns to town and wounds Eastwood. This provides an encounter with another victim of the vigilantes, Rachel (Inger Stevens) who nurses Eastwood and reveals that the same gang raped her after murdering her husband...
Eastwood's character is unlike Gregory Peck's character as the blind seeker of justice in "The Bravados" (1958), and much different for the 'Stranger.' He has now more dialog, he has a romance of sorts, and although he is equally proficient with the gun he always waited for the court's justice rather than dispensing his own, as he readily did in the Italian Westerns. He also exhibits less of the dry humor that had characterized the Stranger, and most sacrilegious of all, he has a name, Jed Cooper.
"Hang 'em High" remains a study of differences between public and private forms of justice, but the motivations behind both are left confused and unsatisfying... The gripping mass execution on a big platform, is brilliantly directed by Ted Post, but the film has neither the magic or the mystique of a Leone film...
He is rescued, eventually cleared of suspicion, and appointed deputy with 'a license to hunt' by a famous hanging-Judge Parker (Pat Hingle) with a clear warning: All the criminals are to be taken alive for trial...
Eastwood proceeds to clean up the worst crimes in the state, but doubting his own motives, he always avoids capturing the gang of nine vigilantes who were responsible for his near-death...
Inexorably, the confrontation comes nearer. The leader of the gang, Captain Wilson (played by Ed Begley), returns to town and wounds Eastwood. This provides an encounter with another victim of the vigilantes, Rachel (Inger Stevens) who nurses Eastwood and reveals that the same gang raped her after murdering her husband...
Eastwood's character is unlike Gregory Peck's character as the blind seeker of justice in "The Bravados" (1958), and much different for the 'Stranger.' He has now more dialog, he has a romance of sorts, and although he is equally proficient with the gun he always waited for the court's justice rather than dispensing his own, as he readily did in the Italian Westerns. He also exhibits less of the dry humor that had characterized the Stranger, and most sacrilegious of all, he has a name, Jed Cooper.
"Hang 'em High" remains a study of differences between public and private forms of justice, but the motivations behind both are left confused and unsatisfying... The gripping mass execution on a big platform, is brilliantly directed by Ted Post, but the film has neither the magic or the mystique of a Leone film...