Poly Movie Review - Paint Your Wagon

http://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Paint-Your-Wagon/60010761?strkid=1647494411_0_0&strackid=98165507dc4c2be_0_srl&trkid=222336 - Netflix
http://amzn.to/2vP5ODL - Amazon
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064782/ - IMDB

It's so much worse when they manage to get you to like a movie before they turn it to shit.

I watched "Paint Your Wagon", a cheesy movie made in the 1960s based on a musical written in the 1940s based on life in California in the 1840s.

I fully expected this movie to suck - after all, it's a musical staring Clint Eastwood, and it got terrible reviews even from people who like musicals. It was incredibly cheesy, even for a musical, but it managed to suck me into the story and make me care about the characters. It was surprisingly deep and progressive in places.

Ben Rumsfield is a drunken goldminer who loves living miles outside of civilization. He hates everything that civilization stands for - rules, regulation, order. His first song is all about how, when a territory becomes a state, the first thing you know, the government comes in and takes away your freedoms (I have to admit to a bit of solidarity here).

On his way to try out a new mountain in California, he witnesses a couple of brothers in a wagon from a large wagon trai, go over a cliff edge, and one of the brothers dies. Ben runs down the mountain to discover that one is still alive. During the funeral, the men helping to dig the grave discover gold dust, which Ben promptly claims with the other brother as his partner, to make up for the first one dying. Here, we officially meet Pardner (Clint Eastwood).

Eventually, a crappy little miner town springs up with a shanty General Store, Barber Shop, the usual. There are 400 men in the town and no women. Until one day, a man drives up in a carriage with 2 women and a baby. We learn that he is a Mormon and the women are his wives, but not too happy about the situation. The miners offer to buy one of his wives, since it's not fair for him to hoarde what is so scarce, and Elizabeth goads her husband into agreeing to sell her, with the assistance of her jealous and catty sister-wife.

So she goes up for auction and Ben awakens from a drunken stupor just long enough to double the highest bidder and win himself a wife. Since they are in a territory and not part of any government, the only legal recourse they have is miner law. So Elizabeth is made a "claim" and purchased by Ben. On their wedding night, she says that even though she is bought and paid for, she'll strike an agreement with Ben. She'll make a good wife and care for him, but in return, he is to build her a log cabin with a stone fireplace and a door she can bolt if she wants to, and he is to treat her with the respect of a wife, not of a paid woman. He agrees.

Eventually, Ben builds Elizabeth a house & Pardner lives on the property in his tent and they continue to mine for gold. But Ben, being the owner of the only woman for hundreds of miles, finds himself turning into a jealous lunatic, terrorizing the other miners with wild accusations & attempts to kill them for the slightest (or imagined) infractions. Well, someone gets word that 6 French prostitutes are arriving in a boom town about a hundred miles away, and Ben and Pardner manage to convince the entire town that they ought to kidnap the prostitutes, and bring them to their town to solve Ben's jealousy issues.

I have to say, even taking into account the era in which the story was written in, and the era in which the story is supposed to take place, the blatant sexism in this story was hard to swallow. I had to keep reminding myself that women really *were* property back then, and that all one could hope for was to find herself an owner ... uh, I mean husband, whom she didn't hate too much. And that prostitutes really *were* (and still are) considered not to have any say in their own bodies, having put them up for rent, they were considered communal property, lower on the food chain than even other women.

( To find out what happens and read spoilers, click here! )



Conclusion: going with my new yardstick for measuring if a movie is poly or not (courtesy of emanix), I've decided this should be included on the list of Poly-ish Movies.

Is It Poly Or Not When Polyamory Doesn't "Win"?

• If a movie's moral is that polyamory or non-monogamy is doomed & monogamy is the better/only/ethical/moral choice, then it is not a poly movie


• If a movie's moral is that prejudice or social pressure to conform destroys lives even when polyamory is otherwise working, then it is a poly movie