I’m sure I’m in the minority when I say I prefer Clint Eastwood the actor to Clint Eastwood the director and even with that, I’m not suggesting that he’s in the same league with Brando or Nicholson or De Niro. In fact, I don’t really think of him as an actor but as a movie star in the classic tradition with an on-screen persona that’s been perfected over the years. That impenetrable façade of toughness and cunning mixed with a wry sense of humor and unshakeable masculine assurance served him well in the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone but it played even better when the adversaries were women, not men. And that’s why my favorite Clint Eastwood films are Play Misty for Me and THE BEGUILED, both of which were made in 1971 (along with Dirty Harry – what a year). Play Misty for Me, of course, was his directorial debut and I’d still rank it high above the maudlin, trite, overrated Million Dollar Baby anyday. But the more intriguing one is THE BEGUILED.

It was his third collaboration with director Don Siegel and one of the most offbeat films of his career….and you could say the same for Siegel as well. It wasn’t a commercial success in the U.S. but was a big hit in Europe where audiences were more receptive to its dark and macabre subject matter. Set during the Civil War era, this atmospheric thriller features Eastwood as a wounded Yankee soldier who is taken in and cared for by a small group of Southern ladies after he is discovered outside the gates of their finishing school.

THE BEGUILED was closer to an art house film than anything he’d done before yet it could have been a commercial success too if it had been marketed intelligently. The real mystery is what attracted Eastwood to the project which is essentially a psychodrama reflecting male castration anxiety. According to Patrick McGilligan’s biography of Eastwood, the actor “would demonstrate, with this and future film properties, that he liked stories where nubile females gazed upon him with adoring eyes.” But the adoration in THE BEGUILED turns to loathing when the devious seducer finally reveals himself, unintentionally uniting the women in sisterhood. As McGilligan noted in Clint: The Life and Legend, “Females on whom Clint Eastwood bestowed the gift of his body came back at him with weapons, not only in THE BEGUILED, but in his next film, Play Misty for Me [another film accused of being misogynistic], and also in High Plains Drifter, The Eiger Sanction and The Rookie. Sudden Impact, Tightrope and Absolute Power would explore related terrain: sex, violence, vengeance.”

The fact that THE BEGUILED works so well and casts an undeniable spell is surprising when you consider three screenwriters worked on it and two of them were so unhappy with the results they took pseudonyms. Based on a novel by Thomas Cullinan, Albert Maltz, one of the original blacklisted Hollywood Ten, was the first to take a stab at it but didn’t really get the appeal of the story despite Siegel’s request to “Pull off the masks of these innocent, virginal nymphs, and you will reveal the dark, hidden secrets of wily manipulators.” He was soon replaced by Irene Kamp, whose screenwriting credits include Paris Blues, The Sandpiper, and The Possession of Joel Delaney. Even though she was the one to accent the Southern aspects of the film and humanize the female characters in a way the novel didn’t, Siegel and Eastwood didn’t like her version either and brought in Claude Traverse, Eastwood’s longtime production associate, to polish the entire script. Traverse received no credit in the end and Maltz and Kamp were listed on the screen, respectively, as John B. Sherry and Grimes Grice. Someone should do a blog on Hollywood directors and screenwriters who have hidden behind pseudonyms and why.

Even if Eastwood’s fans wouldn’t accept or support his attempt to try something new, you’d think some of the more perceptive critics of the day would defend THE BEGUILED. But Variety trashed it in its review saying ‘Pic is essentially black comedy, but treatment is consistently heavy-handed. Script…resorts to tired symbolism, including that chestnut that equates southern womanhood with incestuous dreams under the Spanish moss. Eastwood is not called upon to do much emoting; that is left in spades to the ladies. Page, per usual, runs away with the honors, whether girlishly remembering her erotic relationship with her brother or grimly sawing off Eastwood’s leg in a sequence that would be nauseating if it weren’t so funny.” Funny? Only in Monty Python films are amputations funny and even then, I might only be laughing so I don’t throw up. Feminists attacked THE BEGUILED as well, accusing it of being misogynistic but I think the operational word here is misanthropic since the movie takes a very Ambrose Bierce jaded view of humanity.

Like Eastwood, Siegel was equally disappointed at the response to the film and wrote in his autobiography, “Eastwood films are almost always released like a scatter-gun: play as many theatres as possible and the money pours in. Great. But it should have been recognized that a picture like THE BEGUILED needed to be handled differently. After winning a number of film festivals and acquiring some great quotes, it should have opened in a small theatre in New York. People would have been curious about what kind of an Eastwood picture, co-starring Geraldine Page and Elizabeth Hartman, was playing in one small theatre with such critical acclaim. It would have played for months, maybe a year. It wouldn’t have been a blockbuster; but I guarantee that, at the very least, it would have grown slowly by word of mouth from a small start into a very successful film.”

This proves that Siegel would have been a highly successful marketer if he hadn’t been a director – and that would have been our loss. But for anyone interested in seeing a film that might have changed the course of Eastwood’s (and maybe even Siegel’s) career if it had been successful, THE BEGUILED is a fascinating detour in Dirty Harry’s career. Even though it is no masterpiece, it holds up remarkably well today.

This assessment by Danel Griffin on the web site “Film as Art” (http://uashome.alaska.edu/~dfgriffin/website/beguiled.html) might be the best summation of the movie’s strange appeal and how it plays off Eastwood’s established on-screen persona: “…Eastwood is 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… 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.”

Check out the incredible exploitation-like drive-in approach that the trailer employed. Subtle is not the word to describe it but then again, would people who saw this be disappointed by the actual movie?

THE BEGUILED is currently available on DVD but without the extra features we would like to see accompany this film such as an audio commentary from Mr. Eastwood, one of the few major surviving cast members.