Paint Your Wagon
Two unlikely prospector partners share the same wife in a California gold rush mining town.
- Director: Joshua Logan
- Genre:Comedy / Musical / Romance / Western
Cast
Lee Marvin : Ben Rumson
Clint Eastwood : Pardner
Jean Seberg : Elizabeth
Harve Presnell : Rotten Luck Willie
Ray Walston : Mad Jack Duncan
A wagon crashes into a ravine. Prospector Ben Rumson finds that of the two adult male occupants, one is dead and his brother injured with a broken arm and leg. As the man is about to be buried, gold dust is discovered at the graveside. Ben stakes a claim on the land and adopts the surviving brother as his “Pardner” while he recuperates. Pardner, is portrayed as initially innocent and romantic, illustrated by him singing a pining love song about a girl named Elisa (“I Still See Elisa”), who he later sheepishly confesses exists only in his imagination. Pardner is originally a farmer who hopes to make enough in the gold rush to buy some land, and is openly suspicious of the drunken and seemingly amoral Ben. Ben claims that while he is willing to fight, steal, and cheat at cards, his system of ethics does not allow him to betray a partner, and that he will share the spoils of Ben’s prospecting on the condition that Pardner takes care of Ben in his moments of drunkenness and melancholy.
After the discovery of gold at the grave site, “No Name City” springs up as a tent city with the miners alternating between wild parties (“Hand Me Down That Can o’ Beans”) and bouts of melancholy (“They Call the Wind Maria”). The men become increasingly frustrated with the lack of female companionship in the mining town, and the arrival of a Mormon, Jacob Woodling, with two wives is enough to catch the attention of the entire town. The miners claim it is unfair for the Mormon to have two wives when they have no women, and persuade him to sell one of his wives to the highest bidder. Elizabeth, Jacob’s younger and more rebellious wife, agrees to be sold based on the reasoning that whatever she gets, it can’t be as bad as what she currently has. Read more
