“I Was Crazy Enough to Try Anything.” Clint Eastwood Was a Completely Wrong Choice for This Movie and He Knows It Very Well Himself
Clint Eastwood in 1969 decided to try something new and appear in a film he had not yet acted in. However, the decision turned out to be a big mistake for the actor.
Actors often try to get out of their comfort zone and give new things a chance, so as not to be pigeonholed. Clint Eastwood also experimented in his career, which led him to star in a musical at one stage in his career. The juxtaposition of Clint Eastwood and the musical seems bizarre, but it really happened.
The actor starred in 1969's Paint Your Wagon along with Lee Marvin and Jean Seberg. The film about two prospectors sharing the same wife in a California gold rush-era mining town revealed that Eastwood has no vocal talent and singing is not his forte. This makes his performance in the musical all the more surprising.
The Western star commented on his performance in Paint Your Wagon years later in an interview with Empire, admitting that his casting was wrong and he knows he can't sing.
I was crazy enough to try anything. 've always been interested in music, my father was a singer and I had some knowledge of it. Although what I was doing in that picture was not singing.
It was not only his own lack of musical talent that made Eastwood regret appearing in the musical. Also leading to this were the constant changes in the script, which ultimately completely changed the character of the production. It was no longer the same picture the actor had signed up for.
I was away shooting Where Eagles Dare, and they flew over (Alan Jay Lerner and director Joshua Logan) and talked me back. It was much lighter, it just didn't have the dynamics that the original script did. And that was another long shoot... That was not as pleasant an experience as I was used to.
This is one of those films in which Eastwood regrets his participation. However, he won't erase it from his filmography, so he has to face the fact of his attempt at the musical, which didn't work out as well as he might have initially hoped. But if he hadn't tried, he wouldn't have convinced himself that the genre wasn't made for him.
