The Beguiled (1971 film)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Beguiled arrived in theaters on the 28th of May 1971, a film so strange and unsettling that Universal Pictures struggled to figure out what to do with it. The studio's own promotional posters showed Clint Eastwood holding a gun, promising the kind of action that had made him famous. What audiences actually saw was something far more disturbing: a wounded soldier, outnumbered and outmaneuvered, destroyed by the women he thought he could charm.

  Directed by Don Siegel and based on Thomas P. Cullinan's 1966 novel, the film drops a Union soldier named John McBurney into a Confederate girls' school in rural Mississippi during the Civil War of 1863. He arrives broken and bleeding. He leaves sewn into a burial shroud.

  For years the film was considered a misfire, a commercial disappointment that grossed little over a million dollars. Quentin Tarantino would later call it the closest Siegel ever came to making an art film. What makes that gap between failure and eventual admiration so interesting is how directly it reflects what the film is actually about: a man who wildly misjudges the people around him, right up to the moment it costs him everything.

• 2. Against Type

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  Clint Eastwood received a copy of Cullinan's 1966 novel from producer Jennings Lang, and stayed up through the night reading it. He saw in John McBurney a chance to do something his action roles never allowed. He described it as an opportunity to play true emotions, not "totally operatic" and not "lighting cannons with cigars."

  The role placed him opposite Geraldine Page as the school headmistress Martha Farnsworth, a part that had been considered for Jeanne Moreau before Page was cast. Elizabeth Hartman played Edwina, the twenty-two-year-old schoolteacher with no experience of men. Jo Ann Harris, Darlene Carr, Mae Mercer, and Pamelyn Ferdin filled out the supporting cast.

  Eastwood's own words about winners and losers illuminate why the film unsettled him and his audience. He said that Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino played losers well, but that his audience expected to be there vicariously with a winner. McBurney is no winner. He is a man who believes he is charming his way to safety and ends up poisoned at the dinner table. That gap between how McBurney sees himself and what the women around him actually see was, at the time, a difficult sell for the studio marketing department.

• 3. The House on the Plantation

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  Universal initially wanted Siegel to shoot at Disney Studios Ranch, a controlled studio environment where the production would be easier to manage. Siegel refused. He wanted the real thing: an antebellum estate outside Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in Ascension Parish.

  The location he chose was the Ashland-Belle Helene Plantation, a historic house built in 1841 and once the home of Duncan Farrar Kenner. Its gated enclosures, overgrown grounds, and sealed interiors gave the film its suffocating atmosphere. Some interior scenes were still filmed at Universal Studios, but the estate's physical presence anchored the world of the Miss Martha Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies.

  Filming began in April 1970 and ran for ten weeks. The closed world of that plantation house is inseparable from the film's logic. The gate that keeps Confederate soldiers out is the same gate the women use to carry McBurney's body through at the end. Amy, the twelve-year-old student who first discovers the soldier in the woods, knows exactly where to find the poisonous mushrooms that will kill him.

• 4. Writing the Ending

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  Albert Maltz was brought in to write the screenplay, but his version ended happily: Eastwood's character and one of the women walk away together. Both Eastwood and Siegel rejected it. They wanted an ending faithful to Cullinan's novel, one where McBurney dies, because they felt that version made a stronger anti-war statement.

  The disagreement over the script led to a revision by Claude Traverse, who went uncredited. Maltz ended up credited under a pseudonym, a fact that points to the friction beneath the film's polished surface. The story of its script mirrors the story it tells: competing desires, incompatible intentions, and a resolution that satisfies no one's original plan.

  Siegel spoke about the film's themes in terms that were stark even by the standards of 1971. He said it dealt with sex, violence, and vengeance, and described its foundation as the basic desire of women to castrate men. That framing provoked its own debate, and film critic Judith M. Kass wrote a counterreading that found something closer to feminism beneath the surface: women who are self-sufficient, sexually assertive, capable of running land and educating themselves, driven to desperate measures by a war they had no hand in shaping.

• 5. Critical Fractures

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  Vincent Canby of The New York Times found the film unsuccessful as baroque melodrama, arguing that its twists neutralized everything that had come before. Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave it two stars out of four and criticized Siegel for a broad, leering humor that edged toward exploitation. Gary Arnold of The Washington Post called it "anything but beguiling."

  Variety panned the mix of styles, suggesting the film combined Charles Addams sensibility with Tennessee Williams material in a way that prompted laughter in the wrong places. These were not gentle reservations. They were dismissals.

  Yet Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times called it a triumph of style, "totally engrossing and utterly convincing." Nigel Andrews of The Monthly Film Bulletin praised it when it was most outrageous, singling out Geraldine Page's piously neurotic Martha and a climactic dream sequence that ends with Page and Hartman supporting Eastwood in a pose drawn from Van der Weyden's Pieta, which hangs on Martha's bedroom wall. The film found its most enthusiastic audience not in America but in France, where Pierre Rissient proposed it to the Cannes Film Festival. Eastwood and Siegel agreed to the submission; the producers declined.

• 6. Box Office and Aftermath

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  The film grossed little over a million dollars, earning less than a quarter of what Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song made during the same period. It fell below fiftieth on the charts within two weeks of release.

  Eastwood placed the blame on Universal's marketing, and his anger over the studio's handling of the film did not fade. He had signed a long-term contract with Universal, but the relationship deteriorated. He left the studio in 1975 after The Eiger Sanction, which he both directed and starred in. He did not work with Universal again until Changeling in 2008.

  According to Eastwood and producer Jennings Lang, the film flopped partly because audiences saw him emasculated on screen. That discomfort is visible in the marketing itself. The poster showed him with a gun, reaching for the action-hero audience who would find none. The only action sequence in the entire film is a few seconds of flashback showing McBurney in battle before he is wounded. Everything after that is conversation, jealousy, deception, and the slow consolidation of power by the women around him.

  The film's retrospective score on Rotten Tomatoes reached 90 percent approval, based on 21 reviews. Sofia Coppola later returned to Cullinan's novel for her own adaptation, which had its world premiere at Cannes in May 2017 with Nicole Kidman, Colin Farrell, Kirsten Dunst, and Elle Fanning, and was released by Focus Features on the 23rd of June 2017.