Word: wagon
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Paint Your Wagon has the same composer (Frederick Loewe) and lyricist (Alan Jay Lerner) as Camelot. It also exhibits the same lack of knack. Again there are broad performances more appropriate to marionettes than men. Again there is the literal representation of lyrics, as when the camera shows pines waving to illustrate the haunting song. They Call the Wind Maria. And again there is a backward alchemy, turning folklore into exaggeration...
When it opened on Broadway 18 years ago, Paint Your Wagon was slowed by a static book and a production as badly in need of girls as its miners. On paper, Lerner's improved libretto-and a score with some new music by Andre Previn-seemed to hit the mother lode. But that was before the director made it a fool's Gold Rush. Lee Marvin has done what he could to give the wagon a push onscreen. But the only motion that can give this Loganized vehicle velocity is promotion...
...Paint Your Wagon, Paramount's praise agents laid on a schedule for Marvin that could drive a man to drink -and did. TIME Associate Editor Ray Kennedy and Reporter Mary Cronin rode along. Their report...
Marvin is also something else, an ex-Marine who has given up hunting to help "conserve some of the species," an actor for whom Paint Your Wagon was not just a film but "a dream of a time when I should have lived." As he moved along the chitchat-and-canape circuit last week in his polka-dot shirt, Levi's and sneakers, he seemed more a displaced mountain man than movie star, a character created not by Logan but by Zane Grey. When he launched into one of his stories, punctuated with bammos! and whistles, arm waving...
Later, sprawled on the couch in his hotel suite, Marvin allowed that his fee for Paint Your Wagon was $1,000,000, plus a percentage. He likes the movie for other reasons too: "I was getting tired of being the heavy, always killing guys and slapping broads around...