Clint Eastwood

by Richard Schickel

  There is some question as to who first presented the project to Clint and in what form it came to him. Don Siegel would remember Clint giving him Thomas Cullinan’s novel to read while they were working on Two Mules for Sister Sara and recalled it having been sent to Clint by Jennings Lang. Clint remembers getting a first-draft screenplay to read and thinks it was Lenny Hirshan who provided it. It is certain in any case that by this time a script—again by Albert Maltz—existed and that the agent thought well of it.

  What’s also beyond question is that Clint responded very quickly to whatever material had been sent to him. He read it in a night, found himself disturbed and intrigued by it and passed it on to Siegel for a reality check. The director also loved it. He told Clint he thought it could be their best movie.

  Certainly it would turn out to be the oddest item in their filmographies, not at all the sort of thing anyone would naturally associate with either of them. The Beguiled is, for want of a better term, Southern Gothic, heavily sexualized and, as one or two critics observed, not without elements of very black comedy. Set in the waning days of the Civil War, it tells of a Union soldier, John McBurney, left wounded on a battlefield in the Deep South. There he is discovered by a preadolescent schoolgirl, who conducts him back to the seminary she attends, where he is nursed back to health. In the course of this sojourn he indeed beguiles—perhaps “temporarily maddens” would be a better description—both students and faculty, with deadly results.

  It is a dark and claustrophobic piece and, precisely because the setting is so isolated and so spatially compressed, very intense. After some four years of war and virtually no contact with men, these isolated females are, putting it gently, in a state of high sexual tension. And McBurney, once he starts feeling better, is more than willing to take advantage of as many of them as possible—quite casually, with much misrepresentation of his past and of his true, manipulative nature, for he was a reluctant and distinctly unheroic soldier, as we learn from flashbacks.

  This is not at all a Clint Eastwood role—certainly not as people saw his screen personality at the time. It is not, in fact, a role one can imagine interesting many leading men, given its totally unheroic qualities. All unredeemed, unrationalized slyness aside, he is either bedridden or hobbling about on crutches for the entire length of the film. And, in the end, he gets dead.

  The largest problem Clint and Siegel had with Maltz’s screenplay was its insistence on an upbeat ending permitting McBurney to escape the dark fate for which the story inevitably prepares him (and the audience). It made no sense to them, and it sent them both back to Cullinan’s novel, the rereading of which convinced them of the correctness of his much gloomier conclusion. This, in turn, sent Siegel into extensive confabulations with the screenwriter. The latter, as the director later put it, could not give up on his idea of turning the movie into “a romantic love story,” while Siegel clung to the belief that it had to remain “strange and fierce.” He invoked Ambrose Bierce, Edgar Allan Poe, Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote. He even went so far as to screen Rosemary’s Baby for the writer, hoping to get him in the right mood. “I said, ‘If you’d written this script, Mia Farrow wouldn’t have given birth to the devil. She’d have given birth to healthy blond twin sons.’ ”

  But Maltz couldn’t deal with that approach. To begin with, he said, “These lovely children, taken in by this beguiler, distress me.” But, Siegel argued, that was only what they seemed to be. The whole point of the story—its central irony—was that these females must ultimately prove themselves to be deadlier than the male. “Pull off the mask of these innocent, virginal nymphs and you will reveal the dark, hidden secrets of wily manipulators,” he remembers saying.

  “I don’t agree,” he recalls Maltz replying. “I believe in people.”

  “But not all people. Surely you are aware of evil people you do not believe in.”

  And so it went—around and around, through at least one more full draft and other, lesser rewrites, with pressure building, for star and studio were fully committed to the film; a production designer had been hired and casting discussions were under way. But still Maltz, whose sensibility combined a taste for popular-front uplift with Hollywood hoke in equal parts, couldn’t see what the director was driving at. Like many people of his ideological leanings he believed everyone capable of reform, if not total redemption. So he clung to his principles, until, at last, he was fired.

  At Lang’s suggestion a woman named Irene Kamp was brought in to work on the script, and she did two drafts that were unsatisfactory to all concerned. Finally, the director did what he had done on Coogan’s Bluff: He gave all the extant material to yet another writer, hoping he could paste their best bits together in a serviceable screenplay. The man given this formidable task was Claude Traverse, the film’s associate producer. When he had digested everything, his advice was to return to the book and write a new script that was as faithful as possible to it. This he did in a month, anonymously; the screen credit on the finished film bore Maltz’s pseudonym (John B. Sherry) and Kamp’s (Grimes Grice).

  The shoot was completely agreeable, perhaps the happiest Clint had experienced since returning to American moviemaking. There was, it would seem, virtually no contention in the cast, and he found Geraldine Page, playing the headmistress, particularly enjoyable to work with. She was—or could be—a highly mannered actress and, though right for this role, certainly not the kind of player one imagines Clint falling in with easily. Indeed, before the fact he thought her “out of my league, being a big star on Broadway and all.” But, he told an interviewer, “when we started she told me she was a big fan of mine on Rawhide,” and that set him at his ease. So did her work, for this is one of her most confident performances, its surface gentility rendered without flutter, her inner demons kept on a short leash.

  Clint credits Page with generating much of the good feeling that permeated the production. “She just set an example for all the young players,” he says. When a cast is almost entirely female, he observes, it is not unusual for things to “get a little competitive in wardrobe,” for “the makeup to become different every day.” But not in this case. Page was, as he puts it, “such a ballsy actress”; she just came in without makeup and said, “‘This is the way I am, this is the way I want to do it,’ and then these other young gals were sort of drawn into it.” As for her working methods, Clint compares them to those of another actor with a legendary theatrical reputation, Lee J. Cobb. She was, like him, “ready to go right away, ready to roll, no BS. If there are insecurities, they have them under control; they just step right up to bat.”

  Exteriors and some interiors were shot on a decayed plantation near Baton Rouge, with most of the interiors made on Universal soundstages. The work of the production designer, Ted Haworth, was superb, and his settings were exquisitely lit by Bruce Surtees, a longtime camera operator promoted to director of photography on this film precisely because Siegel, with whom he had frequently worked, was convinced he could give him a look he wanted, but had never before attempted to realize.

  The cameraman, who would soon be known as “the Prince of Darkness” (and become Clint’s regular director of photography for a decade and a half), studied the play of candlelight at home, taking stills lit entirely by these flickering sources and figuring out how to duplicate the effect on set. Similarly, “For the daylight scenes I made sure that no light came from on high,” Surtees recalled. Both on location and sound-stage he used old-fashioned arcs, which provide a very white, bright light, set outside the windows, as the main light source. His great contribution was to ground an exotic story in a kind of unnatural naturalism—his images were shadowed but not oppressively or portentously so. One always feels that someone might just throw open the shutters and let the healing sunlight in, though that never happens.

  Carl Pingitore, the editor, was another significant contributor to the film’s singular qualities. He would go on to cut Clint’s first film as a director, Play Misty fo
r Me, as well as the masterfully edited Dirty Harry, on which he also served as associate producer and postproduction supervisor. The method by which he was engaged for The Beguiled says much about the Siegel-Eastwood working style. The director decided to interview several Universal staff editors for the post. Pingitore was a veteran and expert editor, but because most of his experience had been in television, he did not think he had much of a shot at a feature film. When Siegel asked him for his resume and qualifications, he bristled. “It just hit me wrong,” he recalls, so he snapped back, “I’ve survived for thirty years.” Which was, of course, exactly the right response to a man who saw himself in a similar light—a professional persisting against indifference, watching less gifted men get the good jobs.

  What Siegel and Clint had put together was a curiously mixed bag—action star, method actress, a sprinkling of what might be called starlets, a director known for his quick-step pace and no-nonsense style, a cameraman shooting his first feature, an editor out of down-and-dirty television. But they all rubbed each other the right way, and the film has a freshness about it, a resistance to cliché, that keeps the viewer unsettled.

  The Beguiled announces its singularity with a bold stroke in its very first moments. After the child, Amy (played by Pamelyn Ferdin), finds McBurney, who has a broken leg among other wounds, and is helping him back to her school, a Confederate unit, mopping up after the battle, approaches. The soldier pulls the child down with him into the foliage to hide from them. He ensures her silence not by placing a hand over her mouth but by kissing her—long and hard, almost passionately. It is a totally unexpected moment and even a quarter century later, after we have absorbed so many cinematic shocks, it retains its capacity to startle and discomfit. Indeed, in the entire Eastwood canon (including its many and often discussed violent passages), there is nothing that quite compares to its unexpectedness.

  The school to which McBurney is conducted is located in a rundown, moss-enshrouded mansion. It soon becomes clear that something more than compassion compels Miss Farnsworth and her charges to succor this stranger. The women know that if one of the patrols that keep passing the school finds him he will be sent to Andersonville, the infamous prison camp, where, as a wounded man, his chances of survival would be almost nil, and they make much of this. But he is, as well, a little like the crow Amy keeps as a pet—a strange wild thing to be toyed with.

  Despite McBurney’s condition, and the unfailing politeness and gratitude he manifests in the early days of his recuperation, he is more dangerous than he seems. The first evidence of his true nature appears early, when, as Nellie (Mae Mercer), the black slave of this curious household, tends his wounds, he comes on to her. He stresses that they are both, in effect, prisoners and proposes an alliance that is implicitly sexual, overtly practical—a joint escape.

  As Edward Gallafent suggests, one of the richnesses of the film lies in its sharp, but lightly sketched, awareness of class and social biases. The fact that McBurney is a mere corporal, not an officer, adds to his charm for these isolated, marginalized and declassed Southern belles, irrelevantly perusing lessons in French, deportment and Bible studies while a war rages on their doorstep. He is rather like the gentleman caller in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, “a nice ordinary young man” (in the playwright’s words), whose connection with the energetic practicalities of common life carries with it a promise of regeneration—the same promise, one might note, that Stanley Kowalski more dangerously offers in A Streetcar Named Desire.

  This is a particularly potent lure to Edwina Dabney, who was played by the tragic Elizabeth Hartman. Soon to withdraw from her profession into reclusiveness (she committed suicide in 1987), she is described by Clint as “very, very fragile, a little frail bird”—the Laura-Blanche DuBois figure in this film. Shy, repressed, “nervous,” she is awakened by the presence of a male figure, who precisely because he is wounded is less threatening to her than he would have been in a fully healthy state. He, in turn, feels safe around her, perhaps even drawn to her because of her apparent purity. As the film develops, so does a curiously ambiguous courtship. The possibility that he may genuinely care for her cannot be completely dismissed; neither can the possibility that he may merely be using her.

  The oldest and prettiest of the school’s students, Carol (Jo Ann Harris), sees him in a much less complicated way. She is all libidinal energy, to whom McBurney is simply the convenient, even heaven-sent, instrument of sexual initiation. He sees her as temptation and threat. In her beauty and obvious availability she is a male fantasy incarnate. But if he were to sleep with her and they were found out, his relationship with Edwina would be compromised, and he would have Miss Farnsworth’s wrath to contend with. For he has recognized the headmistress as another kind of threat. A mature and, in some mysterious way, experienced woman, capable of recognizing masculine wiles and stratagems, there is beneath her genteel airs and graces a disturbing hint of darkness.

  In these early passages there is an odd and dislocating quality in Clint’s playing, an almost languid passivity broken by sudden outbursts of aggressiveness. It’s as if the membrane of politesse he has drawn over himself is not strong enough to contain his thrusting male impatience. There is, as well, something animalistic in his presence. He is a creature at once compelled forward by instinctual drive and at the same time naturally wary of what may be a baited trap, which at the movie’s turning point snaps shut on him.

  One night, both Edwina and Miss Farnsworth have reason to anticipate a visit from him, but he is waylaid on the stairs by Carol and, at last, his caution deserts him. He goes with her, is discovered by Edwina, and when they struggle he is pushed down the stairs, rebreaking his leg. Upon examination, Miss Farnsworth declares that gangrene has set in and that the limb must be amputated. The movie remains deliberately ambiguous about the necessity for this operation. It is possible that she is telling the truth. It is more likely that she is having her revenge on him for not coming to her bed.

  The operation, shot from an overhead angle, has the quality of a crucifixion (it is not the only Christian iconography Siegel alludes to in the movie). In Pingitore’s first cut it ran some seven minutes and was, he recalls, too strong for most stomachs, even Siegel’s. It is not easy to take even in its final version. In any case, when McBurney returns to consciousness he, at least, evinces not the slightest doubt about Miss Farnsworth’s true motive. Now the wary animal becomes a raging beast. He attempts to rape Nellie; he invades Miss Farnsworth’s room, discovers letters from her brother that reveal to him their incestuous relationship; he confronts her with her sin in front of the entire school.

  She evades his charges, even turns them to her account—far from being corrupt, she makes the girls believe there was something beautiful (and asexual) in this relationship and reduces McBurney to impotent rage. Why, he cries, did she condemn him to the life of a cripple, why didn’t she go all the way and castrate him? He announces his intention to “have my fill” of the women before leaving. In the course of this diatribe, he kills another of Amy’s pets, a turtle, and though he is instantly remorseful, all—except Edwina—turn against him.

  Now that he is completely broken, Edwina feels it is safe to give herself to him. After they make love they make plans to leave together. A false calm now settles over the old mansion, a polite supper is served and a seemingly contrite McBurney reverts to his old soft and mannerly ways. But, of course, Martha Farnsworth cannot rest easily while he is alive and in possession of her secret, and with the complicity of the others she serves him poisoned mushrooms and he dies. The movie ends with the women sewing a shroud for him.

  The finished film justified both of Clint’s initial responses to the material: It was a terrific movie, one of the most powerful and interesting films he ever made; and it was, indeed, a picture for which there was no appreciable audience. The Beguiled would be one of the few unambiguous flops of his career. It was impossible to place it in any convenient genre category, and
it did not satisfy its star expectations, either. Actors like Clint may suffer endless abuse and indignities as long as they eventually explode in righteous wrath. If, however, at the end of a film they simply subside, their loyal followers feel shocked and cheated.

  On the other hand, the film certainly permitted him to do more (or less, depending on your point of view) than merely “gun people down.” Clint has never been good at articulating his larger aspirations for a movie, so that a casual phrase must be understood to encompass more than it immediately implies. Indeed, if we accept the critic J. Hoberman’s idea that Clint’s most interesting films are bound together by their preoccupation with “the social construction of masculinity as mediated by superstardom,” then that preoccupation must be dated from this film, which largely owed its existence to his passion for it.

  With the rise of gender scholarship in the universities, The Beguiled has lately been read as an exercise in misogyny, an expression of male dread of the devouring female. Two academic writers, Paul Smith and Dennie Bingham, have made much of a remark by Siegel to Stuart Kaminsky, in which he echoed his comments to Maltz: “Women are capable of deceit, larceny, murder, anything. Behind that mask of innocence lurks just as much evil as you’ll ever find in members of the Mafia. Any young girl, who looks perfectly harmless, is capable of murder.”

  It sounds, or can be made to sound, rather shocking. But in this instance one suspects the director should not be taken too literally. When he spoke to Kaminsky he was still smarting from the film’s commercial failure, and, in any case, he had a tendency toward direct and uncomplicated statements, which was of a piece with his directorial manner. He was ever the brutally objective observer of the human condition.

  Whether he was dealing with a prison riot, an alien invasion or dangerously denied sexuality, Siegel coolly respected the internal logic of his stories. If they brought us, eventually, to some outrageous place, we always had a sense of arriving there, as we often do when life brings us to some irrational corner, through a series of steps that are not in themselves particularly menacing. He didn’t like to foreshadow and he didn’t like to direct our sympathies one way or another. He was not about to play these women as victims any more than he was about to play McBurney as a poor lost soul.