Cinema Cycle - Paint Your Wagon

CINEMA CYCLE

(Cardio Workout And Reviewing Movies At The Same Time)

DATE: 10/22/2014

TITLE: Paint Your Wagon

FORMAT: Laserdisc

TIME RIDDEN / FILM LENGTH: 2 hours 46 minutes

DISTANCE RIDDEN WHILE VIEWING: 38.8 miles

TOTAL CINEMA MILES LOGGED: 603.9 miles

SYNOPSIS: Two gold miners share a mining claim and a wife in the wilds of gold rush California.

CONCEPT IN RELATION TO THE VIEWER: Civilization is not a good thing.  The wilderness and an open mind are better than the city and the morals of others.  

PROS AND CONS: This is one of my wife’s favorite films.  So I have seen it more than once before this viewing.  There are a couple of things that make this movie outstanding:

• Music by Lerner & Lowe - once seen, you can’t stop humming these songs in your head.
• Spectacular location shooting before the world of Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) took over Hollywood.
• Character actors that are just as good as the actors in the lead rolls.  
• A fantasy about life in the wilderness without morals or care.  

I believe that this was one of the last of the all out Hollywood musicals in the genre of ‘The Sound of Music’ and ‘South Pacific’ and it goes to show just how much the entertainment industry has lost since the musicals demise.  One of the reasons that films like this are not made anymore is that it takes real talent to create them, both in front of and behind the camera.

The underlying sub-themes of this film are as valid today as they were back in 1969.  Themes of polygamy and polyamorous relationships.  The theme of rigid morals versus the basic good in us all and how we help one another because of shared hardships and community and not because we are told to.  There are also the themes that in the end, greed destroys everything and that deep down, we all have a longing to wander and find what is over the horizon.  

Now it is going to take me at least another week to get the songs “No Name City” and “They Call The Wind Mariah” out of my head.

To read an overview of this project, check out the initial post for this series.

This film is a part of my LaserDisc Collection.

Clicking on the title will take you to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) entry for this film. 

This film was viewed while exercising on my recumbent cycle.  A summary of my time spent working out on my journey through movie-land can be found on Strava.com.

The summary of the project and a glimpse of what is coming up next can be found on my public LaserDisc spreadsheet.