Movie star Clint Eastwood is one of the biggest Hollywood names in the industry. However, it took time and hard work to gain that respect. Eastwood originally turned down the lead role in Mackenna’s Gold, which ultimately went to Gregory Peck. Instead, the actor starred in a small-budget movie called Hang ‘Em High because it had “at least some merit.”
According to Kevin Avery’s Conversations with Clint: Paul Nelson’s Lost Interviews with Clint Eastwood, the actor played his first movie protagonist in America with Hang ‘Em High. He made it after the Dollar films, but those movies didn’t necessarily do him a great service in Hollywood.
Each one of them was a tremendous hit,” Eastwood recalled. “I just decided, maybe it’s time to move on to a few other things. Even after they came to America and did well, still I wasn’t getting a tremendous amount of action.”
Eastwood continued: “I wasn’t getting the action that the trade magazine stars were getting, the kind of people you read about a lot—whomever Joyce Haber liked, just to name an example, not a specific. But I just kept whittling away at it, and finally, I did Hang ’Em High, which was low-budget.”
When Eastwood starred in Hang ‘Em High, his agency wanted him to do another movie called Mackenna’s Gold. The latter film follows how the desperate greed for gold corrupts a group of people. The production wanted him to play the lead, Marshal Sam MacKenna, but he had other plans. Eastwood placed script above all else.
“I talked to Carl Foreman [Mackenna’s Gold’s producer and screenwriter] on several occasions, but I didn’t care for the script,” Eastwood said. “They kept saying, ‘Wow, but you get to work with a lot of well-known actors’—Omar Sharif, who was real hot stuff then—’and it will be a big showcase.’”
Eastwood continued: “I said, ‘Yeah, but I just don’t like the script.’ I think the agency had a little apoplexy when I turned that down to do a one-and-a-half-million-dollar film, and this picture was a big six-, seven-million-dollar extravaganza. It was just my feeling that it was better to do a smaller script that had at least some merit.”
However, Eastwood decided to commit to starring in the 1968 movie Hang ‘Em High instead. The story follows a lawman who returns to bring justice to those who nearly killed him in a lynching. Eastwood played the lead character, Marshal Jed Cooper. It proved to be the right decision for the actor. Nelson made the correct assumption that Hang ‘Em High was a bigger success than Mackenna’s Gold.
“Oh yeah, it was in the black,” Eastwood confirmed. “It made a lot of money, it didn’t cost very much, and it was a very good bargain for the studio. They tacked it onto the Leone trilogy, running foursomes of the picture all over the country.”
Eastwood continued: “Then from that, all of a sudden everybody started saying, ‘We ought to use this guy. Maybe he isn’t just a European deal.’ They looked down on it like it was a European deal. First, they look down on you because you’re from television—television was the real black sheep of the family as far as movie people were concerned at that time.”