Culture news Clint Eastwood is ashamed of this film made 55 years ago: the filming was so bad that he wanted to leave the project
This legendary actor, whose talent is unproven, still does not appreciate this feature film that he shot many years ago.
Clint Eastwood is ashamed of this movie
A true cinema legend, Clint Eastwood no longer needs to be presented. With his extremely rich film career, whether in front of or behind the camera, he is considered an essential figure in American cinema. A large part of the productions in which he has appeared are cult. He also made himself known by playing in westerns, and is inseparable from this type of production.
Now 93 years old, he regularly looks back on his career to talk about what he appreciated the most and what he didn’t. So, in an interview for Empire a few years ago, he admitted to still being ashamed of a very specific feature film. This is La Kermesse de l’Ouest from 1969 (Paint Your Wagon in original version) with Lee Marvin and Jean Seberg. Why didn’t he like this film? The reasons are relatively simple.
The Fair of the West, a bad memory for Clint Eastwood
While Clint Eastwood has nothing to be ashamed of about his filmography, there is still one film of which he is not proud: The Fair of the West. This feature film features an alcoholic brawler and a farmer around 1850 who team up to find gold. During this adventure, they will buy a woman or even kidnap prostitutes. A journey that will be punctuated by their songs, since it is a musical! The problem is that none of the actors had singing lessons before being part of this production. Therefore, the vocal performance of the actors is one of the negative points of this film. What’s more, with numerous rewrites, this feature film no longer resembled at all what Clint Eastwood had initially read.
The film ended up being much shallower and just didn’t have the momentum of the original storyline. Plus, filming took forever. (…) I left to film Agents Die Lonely. The producers of Westward the Wind flew out and convinced me to come back.
Filming too long, storyline changing and Clint Eastwood tried to jump ship in vain. The producers went to retrieve it to finish recording this film which is far from cult. Even today, this production is not appreciated by spectators with an average of 40% on Rotten Tomatoes.