ABSTRACT
Christopher Frayling notes that Hang ‘em High in 1968 is “the first Western made in Hollywood to cash in on Eastwood’s ‘Dollars’ image-and cash in it did, to the tune of $17 million” (284); it is also the first movie made under the auspices of Eastwood’s own production company, Malpaso, which was started up that year. In many ways the film is a literal return to Hollywood for Eastwood. Although the image of the grim and ruthless Eastwood, playing Jedediah Cooper, continually evokes the spaghettis and alludes to them, by and large the movie takes very little from the spaghetti trilogy at other levels. Hang ‘em operates within the thematic parameters and with a miseen-scène that are traditional for the western even if they are exactly what Leone’s movies tended to eschew. Specifically, the movie takes Eastwood’s spaghetti image and turns it to account within the framework of more traditionally American concerns than the Leone movies wanted to deal with.
