PAINT YOUR WAGON: 4K UHD Blu-ray (Paramount, 1969) Kino Lorber
Few movie musicals are as incalculably ill-advised, monstrous atrocities as director, Joshua Logan’s Paint Your Wagon , by 1969, a careworn and very creaky chestnut from another bygone era. The sixties were a particularly detrimental decade for the Hollywood musical. Finian’s Rainbow (1968)…need I say more? While the celluloid escapist song-and-dancers of the thirties and forties relied – chiefly – on hand-crafted material, expressly conceived for the medium of film, increasingly, this balance of power began to shift in the cash-strapped fifties, with studios merely acquiring pre-sold product directly from the Broadway theater. In theory, the logic was sound. Except, what works in stagecraft rarely translates entirely, or even marginally, to the two-dimensional proscenium. Thus, the Broadway-to-Hollywood hybrids, with noted exceptions, became more infamous for their lack in faithfulness, strangely off-kilter with the more expansive movie canvas. This creative chasm was exacerbated by