March 2007 - Old Movies

Old Movies - March 2007

The Beguiled

March 30th 2007 09:18

The Beguiled (1971)

It's the early 70s. Clint Eastwood is on his way to becoming a superstar and the last great Western icon, behind him he has Sergio Leone's blockbusting and envelope-pushing Dollars trilogy, the big budget WW2 potboiler, 'Where Eagles Dare', and Dirty Harry prototype, 'Coogan's Bluff'. Eastwood feels good, Eastwood does good. But he doesn't want to get stale, so he starts looking to push his image a bit, to experiment a little. He makes the irreverant musical western 'Paint Your Wagon' with Lee Marvin, and he'll go on to direct his first film, 'Play Misty For Me', where he portrays a playboy jazz DJ who gets caught up with a psycopathic woman. In between these he makes this film, 'The Beguiled', a civil war-set thriller that treads a fine line between american gothic and dramatic western. It remains one of Eastwood's most daring and against-the-grain performances.

Captain John McBurney (Eastwood) is a Union sniper seriously wounded and left for dead by Confederate soldiers. He is found and rescued by a young southern girl, who takes him back to her house - a boarding school for girls run by the strict and nervous Martha Farnsworth (Geraldine Page). Martha is at first keen to be rid of the Union soldier, but she knows if she hands him over to the Confederates he will die of his wounds in a military prison. And so McBurney finds himself resting up in a secluded southern mansion, with seven young women for company. He lulls them with falsified tales of heroism and self-sacrifice, and aims to bed as many of them as he can.

Director Don Seigal is probably better known for more action-orientated fare these days, but here he and Eastwood got experimental, or at least pushed their boundaries beyond what audiences would have expected from them. Eastwood's character is one of the least sympathetic he has ever played, a lying cad thrown amongst all these adolescent and young women brimming over with burgeoning secuality, ready to take advantage of their naivete in a house devoid of men. Indeed, these girls (mostly) know nothing about men or what they are capable of - at one point one of the girls remarks that you can identify a yankie by pulling their pants down to see if they have a tail or not.

On the other side of the coin, McBurney has no idea what his would-be captors are capable of either, and it's the later parts of the film that will truly test the viewer's own moral compass. Early on in the film we are shown imagery of a wounded crow at the mercy of a young girl... McBurney shares a lot of similarities with such an animal, he's a base creature completely unaware of the consequences of his actions or who's mercy he is at. As the film pushes on past his flirtations and flagrant disregard for the hospitality of his hosts (and the danger of Confederate forces outside the boundaries of the mansion), it traverses into some heady and crazed realms that certainly aren't for the squeamish. Disturbingly, there are also some bizarre and surprising themes of incest and repressed lesbianism skirting around the edges of the film, and it's exciting to see how far the film pushes things.

Eastwood does some of his best acting work here, he does diabolical sleaze and drunken craziness surprisingly well, and even adopts a texan accent at one point (one of the few times I've ever seen him attempt any kind of accent or mimicry on screen). Anyway, this is a highly interesting film - not just for Eastwood or western fans.