Hang 'Em High

(1968)

There is not a more compelling argument against the death penalty made by the most progressive of liberals – which we can safely assume the people involved in making this film are not – than there is in HANG ‘EM HIGH. The message hits harder for being genre entertainment rather than political protest art. Post’s western begins with an innocent man being hanged then reprieved moments before death before he is re-arrested and wrongly incarcerated. The irony of this sequence of events is not lost on the writers of the film. The fault lies not simply with civilians taking the law into their own hands but the legal system using execution as a performance of power to disguise limited manpower and logistics in their territory. Clint Eastwood plays the first of many quasi-supernatural avenging angels in the genre and, while this is not the gothic of HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER or PALE RIDER, the film can legitimately be interpreted as a betrayed man’s dying fantasy as with POINT BLANK the year before. The storyline – and the casting of EASY RIDER’s Dennis Hopper in a small role that foreshadows a figure like Charles Manson – makes reference to the darkening counterculture movement and generational gaps over law and order without ever feeling that this is the frontier period anachronistically transposed to the late sixties. Even if the resolution suggests a re-integration of the individual back into the norms and conventions of traditional society, the open ending is equivocal about the culture’s ability to move forward.