New Movies: Fool's Gold

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A wagon is a square with four wheels. In Paint Your Wagon the wheels are Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood, Jean Seberg and Harve Presnell. The square is Film Maker Joshua Logan, a successful stage director whose ponderous film adaptations (South Pacific, Fanny, Camelot) follow him like a string of mules.

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.

A settlement called No Name City sprouts at the peak of the Gold Rush. Population: male. In No Name dwell a miner, forty-niner (Lee Marvin), and his partner (Clint Eastwood). In time —great gaping wastes of it—along comes a blonde named Elizabeth (Jean Seberg). There isn't enough of Elizabeth to go around, so she shacks up with both partners. They make a beautiful triple until No Name is visited by some outsiders carrying a plague of respectability. Elizabeth succumbs, and only an hour and a half after the audience anticipates it, she settles down with one of her husbands. The other follows his "wand'rin' star" to the next gold strike.

The raucous caucus of miners results in some explosions of laughter. The score—notably I Still See Elisa, I Talk to the Trees and Wand'rin' Star —is strong enough to levitate several musicals. But only Presnell has a legitimate singing voice, and he is given a single solo and a walk-on role as a bordello manager. Seberg's dubbed voice is as thin as the plot, and Eastwood's real one is scarcely a millimeter thicker. Marvin gamely rasps his lines, but crooning is not his bag. Comedy is. Fitted with outrageous muttonchop whiskers and a mop of a mustache, he postures and pratfalls with a grace that was previously achieved only by Buster Keaton and total alcoholics.

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.

Big budget or small, no Hollywood film is complete these days without the "promo bit"—cross-country tours by the stars to plug the movie in the press and on TV. Lee Marvin has gone that route enough times to have pained memories: "Blah, blah, blah. Get stiff. Grab a shower. Take a plane. Blah, blah, blah. Get stiff . . ."

For 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: