During the American Civil War in 1863, Amy, a 12-year-old student at the Miss Martha Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies in rural Mississippi, discovers a seriously wounded Union soldier, John McBurney. She brings him to the school's gated enclosure where the school headmistress, Martha Farnsworth, first insists on turning him over to Confederate troops, but then decides to restore him to health first. He is initially kept locked in the school's music room and kept under watch. Edwina, the schoolteacher who has had no experience with men, takes an immediate liking to John, as does Carol, a 17-year-old student who makes advances with an experienced air.
John begins to bond with each of the women in the house, including the slave Hallie. As he charms each of them, the sexually repressed atmosphere of the school becomes filled with jealousy and deceit, and the women begin to turn on one another. After Carol, who earlier made a welcomed pass at John, witnesses John kissing Edwina in the garden, she ties a blue rag to the school's entrance gate to alert the Confederate troops to the presence of a Yankee soldier. When a band of Confederate soldiers see it while passing the school, Martha lies and helps John pretend he is a relative loyal to the Confederacy.
Martha also becomes infatuated with John, and a flashback shows her having an incestuous relationship with her brother. Martha considers keeping John at the school as a handyman. She makes sexual advances toward him, which he resists.
Late one night, Edwina discovers John having sex with Carol in her bedroom. In a jealous rage, she beats him with a candlestick, causing him to fall down the staircase and break his leg severely. Martha insists he will die of gangrene unless they amputate his leg. The women carry him to the kitchen where they tie him to the table. Martha saws off his leg at the knee. When John awakens and learns that his leg has been amputated, he goes into a fury, convinced that Martha performed the operation as revenge for his rejection of her sexual advances.
John, again under lock and key, convinces Carol to unlock his door. He sneaks from his room into Martha's and steals a pistol and some personal items of Martha's including some letters from her brother. Convinced that Martha plans to hold him prisoner, John confronts Martha at gunpoint, claiming control of the house and declaring his intention to have his way with any of the women or girls. He gets drunk and then confronts the entire household, revealing that he read Martha's letters and that they implicate Martha and her brother in an incestuous relationship. In a fit of anger he also accidentally kills Amy's pet turtle, which he immediately regrets and apologizes for, to no avail, as Amy professes her hatred of him. Edwina follows John to his room and professes her love for him. They begin to kiss and it is later implied that they had sex.
Meanwhile, Martha convinces the others (except for Edwina, who is not present) that they need to kill John to prevent him from denouncing them to Union troops who have made camp within sight of the school. Martha asks Amy to pick mushrooms they can prepare "especially for him" and Amy says she knows just where to find some. At dinner, John apologizes for his actions, and Edwina reveals that she and John have made plans to leave the school and marry. John has been eating the mushrooms and the others pass the bowl without taking any except for Edwina. When she starts to eat some, Martha cries out for her to stop. John realizes he has been poisoned, leaves the dining room disoriented, and collapses in the hallway. The following day, the women sew his corpse into a burial shroud and carry him out of the gate to bury. They agree he died of exhaustion, and Amy denies she could ever pick a poisonous mushroom by mistake.
Clint Eastwood was given a copy of the 1966 novel by producer Jennings Lang, and was engrossed throughout the night in reading it.[3] This was the first of several films where Eastwood agreed to storylines where nubile females look at him adoringly (including minors in this film and Pale Rider).[3] Eastwood considered the film as "an opportunity to play true emotions and not totally operatic and not lighting cannons with cigars".[4]Albert Maltz was brought in to draft the script, but disagreements in the end led to a revision of the script by Claude Traverse, who although uncredited, led to Maltz being credited under a pseudonym.[5] Maltz had originally written a script with a happy ending, in which Eastwood's character and the girl live happily ever after. Both Eastwood and director Don Siegel felt that an ending faithful to that of the book would be a stronger anti-war statement, and Eastwood's character would be killed.[6] The film, according to Siegel, deals with the themes of sex, violence and vengeance, and was based around "the basic desire of women to castrate men"[7] though the central theme was the impact of a man having sex with multiple women.
Universal initially wanted Siegel to film at a studio at Disney Studios Ranch, but Siegel preferred to have it filmed at an antebellum estate near Baton Rouge, Louisiana in Ascension Parish: the Ashland-Belle Helene Plantation, a historic house built in 1841, that was a plantation estate and home of Duncan Farrar Kenner.[8] Portions of the interiors were filmed at Universal Studios. Filming started in April 1970 and lasted 10 weeks.[9]
Eastwood had signed a long-term contract with Universal but became angry with the studio because he felt that they botched its release. This eventually led to his leaving the studio in 1975 after the release of The Eiger Sanction, which he directed as well as starred in. He would not work with Universal again until 2008's Changeling.
Eastwood said of his role in The Beguiled,
Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino play losers very well. But my audience like to be in there vicariously with a winner. That isn't always popular with critics. My characters have sensitivity and vulnerabilities, but they're still winners. I don't pretend to understand losers. When I read a script about a loser, I think of people in life who are losers, and they seem to want it that way. It's a compulsive philosophy with them. Winners tell themselves I'm as bright as the next person. I can do it. Nothing can stop me.[10]
Reception
“The subjects to which Siegel is drawn, the manner in which they are filmed, [among these] The Beguiled...are informed and illuminated by his sensibility. It takes great courage to display one’s innermost thoughts on film without flinching. Siegel will dare anything filmically; his movies transcend the impersonality of other, equally talented directors.”—Biographer Judith M. Kass in Don Siegel: The Hollywood Professionals, Volume 4 (1975).[11]
Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that the film "is not, indeed, successful as baroque melodrama, and, towards the end, there are so many twists and turns of plot and character that everything that's gone before is neutralized. People who consider themselves discriminating moviegoers, but who are uncommitted to Mr. Siegel will be hard put to accept it, other than as a sensational, misogynistic nightmare."[12] A negative review in Variety said that the film "doesn't come off, and the apparent attempt to mesh Charles Addams style with Tennessee Williams-type material cues audience laughter in all the wrong places."[13]Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film two stars out of four and wrote that Siegel "unfortunately elects to tell his story with a broad and leering humor that at times is barely distinguishable from a sexploitation shocker."[14]Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times praised The Beguiled as "a film of psychological suspense laced with dark humor that is a triumph of style, totally engrossing and utterly convincing."[15] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post slammed the film as "anything but beguiling. Weird, yes; trashy, yes; pathetic, yes; beguiling, no."[16]Nigel Andrews of The Monthly Film Bulletin called it "a film that works best when it is most outrageous. Geraldine Page's piously neurotic Miss Martha and Elizabeth Hartman's sickly Edwina hover on the brink of self-parody for most of the film, and are pushed well over in Siegel's climactic dream sequence, which begins with multiple-exposure effects and triangular embraces and ends with a shot of the two women supporting a limply naked Eastwood in the pose of Van Der Weyden's 'Pieta' (which hangs ambiguously on Page's bedroom wall)."[17]
The film received major recognition in France, and was proposed by Pierre Rissient to the Cannes Film Festival, and while agreed to by Eastwood and Siegel, the producers declined.[10] It would be widely screened in France later and is considered one of Eastwood's finest works by the French.[18] The film was poorly marketed and in the end grossed little over $1million, earning less than a fourth of what Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song did at the same time and falling to below 50 in the charts within two weeks of release.[10]
Made right before Dirty Harry, this was a bold early attempt by Eastwood to play against type. It was not a hit, likely due to uncertainty on Universal's part concerning how to market it, eventually leading them to advertise the film as a hothouse melodrama: "One man...seven women...in a strange house!" "His love... or his life..." According to Eastwood and Jennings Lang, the film, aside from being poorly publicized, flopped due to Eastwood's being "emasculated in the film".[10] The film's poster, for example, shows him with a gun, suggesting an action movie, but the only action consists of a few seconds of flashback to Eastwood's character in battle before being wounded.
Quentin Tarantino later wrote the movie "was the closest Siegel ever came to making an art film... and truth be told, as good as it is, as its director, he's miscast. While the offbeat film is ultimately successful, it does bring out Siegel's worst stylistic impulses. His fondness for Freudian imagery, his literalness in a tale that screams for ambiguity (a dream sequence in the middle makes explicit everything that had only been suggested). However, once Siegel settles down and focuses on Eastwood, the film comes alive."[19]
The Beguiled holds a 90% approval rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 21 reviews, with a weighted average of 7.3/10.[20]Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 66 out of 100, based on 6 critics, indicating "generally favourable reviews".[21]
Theme
“Women are capable of deceit, larceny, murder, anything. Behind that mask of innocence lurks just as much evil as you’ll find in members of the Mafia. Any young girl, who looks perfectly harmless, is capable of murder.” — Filmmaker Don Siegel from an interview with Stuart M. Kaminsky in Take One (Canadian film journal), June, 1972[22]
Even when faced with Siegel's contentious statement about women, film critic Judith M. Kass probes deeper to uncover elements of feminism within 'The Beguiled', presenting an alternate perspective:
These “ladies” may be more like men in every way than either men or women would like to acknowledge. They are sexually aggressive and are depicted as being able to run their lives, fend off intruders, farm their own land, educate them selves—to do themselves those things for which women have traditionally turned to men. These females have inverted their world; while they acknowledge the need for men, they are self-sufficient.[23]
Kass continues: “The women in The Beguiled are not all bad; they are hard-pressed, unused to the lives they are leading, victimized by events they had not had in shaping, sexually thwarted at the stages in their development when they should be freest. They can trust no friend, let alone foe: the Confederates who offer to guard them obviously have rape in mind and the Yankee in their midst acts like the master of a private seraglio. Why shouldn’t they become desperate, say and do things that wouldn't under ordinary circumstances?”[24]
↑ Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism. "Ashland Historical Marker". Archived from the original on February 17, 2012. Retrieved November 19, 2016.
Donald Siegel was an American film and television director and producer.
Clinton Eastwood Jr. is an American actor and film director. After achieving success in the Western TV series Rawhide, Eastwood rose to international fame with his role as the "Man with No Name" in Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy of spaghetti Westerns during the mid-1960s and as antihero cop Harry Callahan in the five Dirty Harry films throughout the 1970s and 1980s. These roles, among others, have made Eastwood an enduring cultural icon of masculinity. Elected in 1986, Eastwood served for two years as the mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California.
The Outlaw Josey Wales is a 1976 American revisionist Western film set during and after the American Civil War. It was directed by and starred Clint Eastwood, with Chief Dan George, Sondra Locke, Bill McKinney and John Vernon. During the Civil War, Josey Wales is a Missouri farmer turned soldier who seeks to avenge the death of his family and gains a reputation as a feared gunfighter. At the end of the war his group surrenders but is massacred, and Wales becomes an outlaw, pursued by bounty hunters and soldiers.
Mary Elizabeth Hartman was an American actress of stage and screen. She debuted in the popular 1965 film A Patch of Blue, playing a blind girl named Selina D'Arcy, opposite Sidney Poitier, a role for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress, and won the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year.
Dirty Harry is a 1971 American neo-noir action thriller film produced and directed by Don Siegel, the first in the Dirty Harry series. Clint Eastwood plays the title role, in his first appearance as San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) Inspector "Dirty" Harry Callahan. The film drew upon the real-life case of the Zodiac Killer as the Callahan character seeks out a similar vicious psychopath.
Play Misty for Me is a 1971 American psychological thriller film directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, his directorial debut. Jessica Walter and Donna Mills co-star. The screenplay, written by regular Eastwood collaborators Jo Heims and Dean Riesner, follows a radio disc jockey (Eastwood) being stalked by an obsessed female fan (Walter).
Magnum Force is a 1973 American neo-noir action thriller film and the second to feature Clint Eastwood as maverick cop Harry Callahan after the 1971 film Dirty Harry. Ted Post, who had previously worked with Eastwood on Rawhide and Hang 'Em High, directed the film. The screenplay was written by John Milius and Michael Cimino. The film score was composed by Lalo Schifrin. This film features early appearances by David Soul, Tim Matheson and Robert Urich. At 123 minutes, it is the longest of the five Dirty Harry films.
The Enforcer is a 1976 American neo-noir action thriller film and the third in the Dirty Harry film series. Directed by James Fargo, it stars Clint Eastwood as Inspector "Dirty" Harry Callahan, Tyne Daly as Inspector Kate Moore, and DeVeren Bookwalter as criminal mastermind Bobby Maxwell. It was also the last film in the series to feature John Mitchum as Inspector Frank DiGiorgio.
High Plains Drifter is a 1973 American Western film directed by Clint Eastwood, written by Ernest Tidyman, and produced by Robert Daley for The Malpaso Company and Universal Pictures. The film stars Eastwood as a mysterious stranger who metes out justice in a corrupt frontier mining town. The film was influenced by the work of Eastwood's two major collaborators, film directors Sergio Leone and Don Siegel. In addition to Eastwood, the film also co-stars Verna Bloom, Mariana Hill, Mitchell Ryan, Jack Ging, and Stefan Gierasch.
Escape from Alcatraz is a 1979 American prison thriller film directed and produced by Don Siegel. The screenplay, written by Richard Tuggle, is based on the 1963 non-fiction book of the same name by J. Campbell Bruce, which recounts the 1962 prisoner escape from the maximum security prison on Alcatraz Island. The film stars Clint Eastwood as escape ringleader Frank Morris, alongside Patrick McGoohan, Fred Ward, Jack Thibeau, and Larry Hankin with Danny Glover appearing in his film debut.
The Eiger Sanction is a 1975 American action film directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. Based on the 1972 novel The Eiger Sanction by Trevanian, the film is about Jonathan Hemlock, an art history professor, mountain climber, and former assassin once employed by a secret government agency, who is blackmailed into returning to his deadly profession for one last mission.
Two Mules for Sister Sara is a 1970 American-Mexican Western film in Panavision directed by Don Siegel and starring Shirley MacLaine and Clint Eastwood set during the French intervention in Mexico (1861–1867). The film was to have been the first in a five-year exclusive association between Universal Pictures and Sanen Productions of Mexico. It was the second of five collaborations between Siegel and Eastwood, following Coogan's Bluff (1968). The collaboration continued with The Beguiled and Dirty Harry and finally Escape from Alcatraz (1979).
Madigan is a 1968 American neo-noir crime drama thriller film directed by Don Siegel and starring Richard Widmark, Henry Fonda and Inger Stevens.
Coogan's Bluff is a 1968 American crime thriller film directed and produced by Don Siegel. It stars Clint Eastwood, Susan Clark, Don Stroud, Tisha Sterling, Betty Field and Lee J. Cobb. The film marks the first of five collaborations between Siegel and Eastwood, which continued with Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), The Beguiled (1971), Dirty Harry (1971) and Escape from Alcatraz (1979).
Dirty Harry is an American neo-noir action thriller film series featuring San Francisco Police Department Homicide Division Inspector "Dirty" Harry Callahan. There are five films: Dirty Harry (1971), Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983) and The Dead Pool (1988). Clint Eastwood portrayed Callahan in all five films and directed Sudden Impact.
Breezy is a 1973 American romantic drama film directed by Clint Eastwood, produced by Robert Daley, and written by Jo Heims. The film stars William Holden and Kay Lenz, with Roger C. Carmel, Marj Dusay, and Joan Hotchkis in supporting roles. It is the third film directed by Eastwood and the first without him starring in it.
Clint Eastwood was born on May 31, 1930, in San Francisco, California, to Clinton Eastwood Sr. and Margret Ruth.
Clint Eastwood has had numerous casual and serious relationships of varying length and intensity over his life, many of which overlapped. He has eight known children by six women, only half of whom were contemporaneously acknowledged. Eastwood refuses to confirm his exact number of offspring, and there have been wide discrepancies in the media regarding the number. His biographer, Patrick McGilligan, has stated on camera that Eastwood's total number of children is indeterminate and that "one was when he was still in high school."
The Beguiled is a 2017 American Southern Gothic thriller film written and directed by Sofia Coppola, based on the 1966 novel of the same name by Thomas P. Cullinan. It stars Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, and Elle Fanning. It is the second film adaptation of Cullinan's novel, following Don Siegel's 1971 film of the same name.
Thomas P. Cullinan was an American novelist and playwright, as well as a writer for television. He is perhaps best known for his 1966 novel The Beguiled, which was made into two films of the same name, in 1971 and again in 2017.
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