Despite the fact that Paint Your Wagon seems to have a non-existent plot line (at least for the first two thirds of its running time) it is a film that I did find to be highly enjoyable. Although the storytelling is rather weak, the writers provide so many humorous scenes that to me it very rarely mattered. Lee Marvin is the main reason to see this and his performance here was nothing short of sublime. Although Marvin was great here, I was a little disappointed with Eastwood. The truth of the matter is that his character was a bit bland and nowhere near as interesting as Marvin's character. However, the blame for this lies with the writers and not Eastwood and I just didn't find his character that interesting and also found the chemistry between Eastwood and Marvin was a bit hit and miss.
The musical numbers here are colourful, lively and very enjoyable (I don't think there was one song that I didn't like). However, usually with musicals songs are used to cover plot points or to convey emotions from characters. In Paint Your Wagon there were a couple of songs here that worked in this manner, but a lot of songs were rather random and had nothing to do with the story. Again this isn't a major problem as the musical numbers were fun, but again it made the story a little strange at times.
Where this film really comes good is in its final third (when we get to the point of the story) and the final act was absolutely hilarious.
On balance there is definitely more good than bad here. Despite the fact that there was no real story for the first two thirds of the film, there were still enough fun moments to make this worthwhile overall. However, Lee Marvin's superb performance and incredibly funny on-screen antics are definitely the biggest selling points here.
