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The Beguiled
Clint Eastwood’s western personality is one of the most iconic in all of cinema—the dusty, anonymous stranger who struts confidently into the archetypal Old West saloon, instantly silences the room with his arrival, orders a drink of hard liquor, glares with his squinty eyes, and talks in a rasp that reveals absolutely nothing about himself and everything about his violent intentions. Most of the time he is a mercenary, working for his own self interest; even when he isn’t, he prefers to work alone and dish out a personal form of justice that probably everyone but himself will find extreme and depraved. If John Wayne’s boyscout cowboy was the symbol of the golden age of the Hollywood western, Eastwood’s opportunistic Man with No Name—and the man with seemingly no past or future—became the hero of the revisionist western, when the line between good and evil was suddenly significantly murkier. We first met this dangerous loner in Sergio Leone’s 1964 career-making (for both the actor and the director) A Fistful of Dollars, and a chord struck with audiences that Eastwood kept close to his vest for the remainder of his career in westerns, which finished with 1992’s Unforgiven. In these films and every western made in between them, he essentially played the same character, with each film casting a slightly different variation on his increasingly mysterious personality. In Two Mules for Sister Sara (1969) he was almost an exact replica of the personality he established in the Leone films (and even those films weren’t in direct continuity to each other); in Pale Rider (1985), he was a revenge-seeking priest with a heart of gold and a fury of steel; in High Plains Drifter (1973), he was quite literally a wronged ghost back from the grave to dish out some undead retribution. In all these films, his soft-spoken deadliness and unbeatable quick-draw painted different interpretations of the same jagged cowboy. There are more disparities in the James Bond actors, who all supposedly played the same character, than there are in Eastwood cowboy. In most of these films, it is Eastwood’s character who controls the canvas, with all the supporting players at the mercy of the plans he concocts in order to implement his brutal agenda. But two Eastwood westerns made in the 1970s did their damndest to place him into scenarios that he couldn’t control, in order to cast his nameless cowboy in a different light. The more famous of these was the Eastwood-directed The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), which found his loner cowboy with a surrogate family thrust upon him that forced him to adjust to being the patriarch of a bunch of social outcasts. But before that one, which is now considered a landmark western, was 1971’s little-seen The Beguiled, directed by Don Siegel. It is also a successful film that places Eastwood’s loner in an unlikely scenario that shines some light on his persona; nevertheless, like all his westerns, this film ultimately keeps him encased in the ambiguity where he constantly dwells. In The Beguiled, the Eastwood cowboy is a Union officer on the twilight of the American Civil War. His name is Cpl. John McBurney, but adds, “Everyone just calls me McB.” Just as well: “McB” makes for as good a name for this recurring character as any, because the name is always irrelevant without a back story that is never provided. Just about all his westerns provided a name, but how many of them do you actually remember, except if they were part of the title—as in Josey Wales and Joe Kidd (1972)? Even Leone’s Man with No Name trilogy provided three different names for Eastwood, but we hardly recall them because the character is so masked in anonymity. A name is generally supposed to indicate a history, and the Eastwood cowboy has none. After being severely wounded in battle, McB finds himself crippled and imprisoned in a girl’s boarding school in Tennessee. The school is headed by Geraldine Page, that wonderful actress unmatched in her ability to play haunted, mature women. McB remains at Page’s mercy as she and her girls nurse him back to health and, quite horrifically, eventually un-nurse him again to un-health (think Stephen King’s Misery as a Civil War western and you’ve pretty much got it). The entire film unfolds within the walls of this boarding school, where both girls and women engage in lurid sexual fantasies focused on McB that are certainly not becoming their “Southern lady” stereotypes. And of course, McB is scoundrel enough to help more than a few of these fantasies become realties, between his skirmishes with Confederate officers who often (and unsuccessfully) come calling for the “services” of the ladies. As the film progresses and the women grow more and more shocking in their interactions with McB, both the audience and the imprisoned soldier wonder suspiciously about the “sophisticated” women’s true natures. The noblest and most humane of them all is Hallie (Mae Mercer), a black slave who provides the film’s moral backbone, however murky. But even she eventually sides with the other women’s schemes, if only to encourage McB to flee before the situation gets out of hand. But we’re about two steps ahead of her: By the time McB realizes that he’s in more danger from the ladies than he is from the Confederate Army, we’ve correctly guessed it might be too late for his own survival plans to work. To be fair: he’s surrounded by a dozen beautiful sirens, and we are not. A girl’s boarding school seems an improbable place for the Eastwood cowboy to inhabit, but this is a western through-and-through: Besides the Old West era and location (Tennessee is technically not the West, but its southern plains often serve as the setting for many western films), Eastwood remains very much the anonymous, dusty ruffian with his own vague agenda. And just because the desert landscape has been replaced with closed walls doesn’t make the setting any less barren than the typical Old West town. This is a film about a mysterious drifter who wanders into a place in which untamed codes are in a battle with civilized law; like any of Eastwood’s westerns, it is his unsettling, ambiguous nature that clearly sets these contrasting mentalities against each other. I’ll grant that unlike his other westerns, Eastwood just might have finally met his match with Geraldine Page and her ladies. They ultimately band together to stand against his influence over them, but not before he successfully seduces many of them into his bed and matches wits with Page’s cunning headmistress. It is too easy to suggest that Eastwood’s character here is a critique of the Yankee soldier in a genre that is decidedly Dixie in its roots and heroes (Josey Wales, Eastwood’s later protagonist, is a Confederate soldier who never surrendered, and McB is the type of Yankee scum Wales would have loved to kill); yes, McB is a rogue, but he is primarily acting this way because he realizes the impossible situation he is in as a crippled Yank trapped in a Southern girl’s boarding house. He seduces them as a matter of survival, because he is perceptive enough to deduce that these women, including Page, are willing and ready to be seduced. Director Siegel cleverly incorporates voice-overs from all the females that reveal their most intimate thoughts, and Eastwood smiles cunningly as if he is reading their minds. We do not condone his actions, but we understand them as the tactics of a beast at bay. Where The Beguiled really gets tricky is in the motivations of these women. Flashbacks reveal Page’s questionable credentials as the headmistress to a “proper” boarding school, and these girls, from child to young adult, are so ready to sleep with McB that I’d like to know what exactly Page was teaching them before he wandered in. As in all his westerns, Eastwood’s entrance provides a clash between the civilized and uncivilized; in this case, that battle is manifested in carnal impulses and the limitations that cultured society has placed on them. McB obviously represents the former; I’m not sure that Page and her girls represent the latter so much as they think they do, before Eastwood rides in pulls the veil from their eyes. The effect is not dissimilar to High Plains Drifter, in which Eastwood enters a seemingly quaint western town and, through ironic acts of violence, slowly peels away the layers of its supposed civility to reveal the depraved hypocrisy that fuels its citizens. The difference in The Beguiled is that Eastwood is ultimately trapped in a situation that he cannot control, and unwittingly falls victim himself to his own lustful desires that we have never seen ensnare either Josey Wales or the High Plains Drifter. Indeed, we are inclined to think that such trappings are impossible for this cunning desperado, but The Beguiled is invaluable for the dimensions that it adds to this archetypal character: Suddenly, his showdowns require words instead of action, and his enemies are not bandits or fellow gunslingers but intelligent women who are onto his plan even as they find themselves willing to go along with it. Who will win in this battle depends on which party eventually comes to their senses first. This is an unusual film for director Don Siegel as well; he was better known for his action pictures, many of which starred Eastwood—including Two Mules and the cult-classic cop drama Dirty Harry (also released in 1971). Siegel successfully captures an appropriate look for the film, with its claustrophobic walls and eerie gardens. He shoots with slightly tilted angles to make everyone in the frame look puzzled and disoriented, and it works. The effect adds a Tennessee Williams-like Southern Gothic atmosphere to the proceedings. Once we understand that this will not be a conventional action-packed western but instead a character study, we allow Siegel’s style to get under our skin and become creepy on its own terms. It’s appropriate that Siegel also directed the original, 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, about pod-people from outer space who deem Earth a fitting place to invade and replace human beings with vegetables devoid of emotion. If these aliens had only used The Beguiled as the template for the effects of human feeling, their invasion could have been interpreted as an act of kindness. Surely the discomfort we feel in both films is related—Body Snatchers for its lack of passion, The Beguiled for its overabundance of passions gone wild. The acting is also exceptional: Eastwood seems comfortable reinterpreting his standard drifter and does so convincingly; likewise, Page is downright terrifying as a woman whose sexuality has become so repressed that it has slowly trickled down into her pupils and threatens to tear them all apart. Watch carefully the way she handles Confederate soldiers who undress her with their eyes and offer their “protection” to the ladies—the way she humors them and allows them to dance around their true intentions before sending them back to the battlefront. Then watch the following scene between her and Eastwood, and how the pent-up frustration against these lecherous soldiers is unleashed on him. It is no wonder than when Eastwood holds the house at gunpoint and offers his services to any woman who wants it, the girls respond with a sort of relieved glee. At least now they can be honest about their carnal desires. What’s crucial is that during these proceedings, the ultimate mystery of Eastwood’s cowboy persona is maintained even as it is challenged. He is given no context except the present; his past is non-existent, and his future is meaningless, except to know that he will return in some other incarnation and with a new pseudonym in the next Eastwood western. He exists perpetually in the Now, restlessly drifting from picture to picture, and it is the endless, apparently futile wandering that makes this hero so utterly compelling. The Beguiled is bold enough to paint this standard rugged loner in a light that we’ve never seen him in before, that dares to place him in a scenario that forces him out of his natural environment and pushes him closer to full disclosure. The film is eventually smart enough to leave him be, dancing tantalizing on that edge without pushing him out from behind the curtain, where we prefer him. He thus finally emerges back into the shadows again, so that we eagerly anticipate his next, equally enigmatic appearance. Cast: A Universal Pictures release. Directed by Don Siegel. Written by Albert Maltz and Ireme Kamp, from the book by Thomas Cullinan. Rated R for language, sexuality/nudity, and a scene of extreme gore. Running time: 105 minutes. Original United States theatrical release date: March 31, 1971. Questions? Comments? E-mail me: danel_the_tinman@hotmail.com |
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