The Beguiled (1971): Siegel and Eastwood's Hothouse Gothic

In 1971 Don Siegel made two films with Clint Eastwood. One of them was Dirty Harry, which sold tickets for a decade and started an argument that is still running. The other was The Beguiled, which Universal released in the spring, sold on a poster of Eastwood looking rugged, and watched die. American audiences turned up expecting a Civil War western and got a hothouse Southern Gothic in which their star spends most of the running time in a bed being nursed to death by women. It flopped hard. France loved it. Eastwood has said for decades that it is among the best films he has been in, and he is right.

It is also the most interesting thing either man ever did with the Eastwood persona, because it is the only picture that treats that persona as a pathology and then dissects it in front of you.

The setup

Corporal John McBurney is a wounded Union soldier found in the woods by a girl gathering mushrooms near a Confederate girls’ seminary in Louisiana. The school is down to a handful of students, a headmistress, a teacher and one enslaved woman kept on after everyone else has gone. Martha Farnsworth, who runs the place, decides to nurse McBurney until he can be handed to the Confederate army. He decides to make himself indispensable in the meantime.

Geraldine Page plays Martha, and the film belongs to her. Elizabeth Hartman is Edwina, the teacher. Jo Ann Harris is Carol, the oldest student. Mae Mercer is Hallie, the enslaved woman, and she is the only person in the house who reads McBurney accurately from the first minute — a piece of writing that is sharper than anything the film’s reputation suggests. Pamelyn Ferdin is Amy, the child who found him.

The screenplay came from Thomas P. Cullinan’s 1966 novel A Painted Devil, and it is credited to John B. Sherry and Grimes Grice — pseudonyms for Albert Maltz, one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, and Irene Kamp. Bruce Surtees photographed it, and this is the film where his gift for shooting darkness as an actual substance first arrived; he would go on to shoot most of Eastwood’s best-looking pictures.

What Siegel does with Eastwood

The casting is the argument. By 1971 Eastwood was the Man with No Name and the cop with the .44, an actor whose whole apparatus was competence, silence and the reliable use of force. Siegel takes that apparatus and immobilises it. McBurney’s leg is ruined. He cannot leave. His only remaining weapon is his charm, and so the film puts Eastwood in a nightgown and makes him work.

What he does with it is remarkable. McBurney tells a different story about himself to every woman in the house — his war, his politics, his sincerity, all adjusted per listener — and Eastwood plays each version with total conviction, so that the picture accumulates a portrait of a man who is entirely fluent and entirely hollow. He seduces the headmistress with gravity, the teacher with tenderness and the student with insolence, and the film cuts between the three registers close enough together that you can watch the machine change gear.

Siegel’s decision to let the star do this is the boldest thing in his filmography. Eastwood was building a persona at that exact moment, and here he loans it out to be examined as a con. It is the same body, the same voice, the same laconic authority, revealed as a set of tools that a certain kind of man uses on rooms he wants something from.

The mechanics — heat as structure

The film is built as a pressure vessel and every craft decision serves the seal. Surtees lights the interiors almost entirely with what looks like candlelight and shuttered daylight, so the house is a series of hot amber pockets in a great deal of black. The exteriors are green and airless. Nothing in the picture ever feels ventilated.

Siegel keeps the camera close and the cutting slow, and he uses one device with real precision: the dissolve into fantasy. Characters imagine things — the headmistress in particular, whose interior life includes a sequence involving her brother that the film delivers in soft, unstable images and then never mentions again. Placing these inside an otherwise realist picture destabilises the whole thing. You stop trusting what the house is showing you at roughly the same rate the house stops trusting McBurney.

Lalo Schifrin’s score is doing the same job from the other side, working folk-tune fragments into something increasingly wrong. Schifrin scored Dirty Harry the same year with jazz and dread; here he plays a music box slowly breaking.

The structure is the real achievement. For the first hour, the tension is whether the women will hand McBurney over. Somewhere in the middle the question quietly inverts, and the film becomes about whether McBurney will get out alive — and Siegel never announces the pivot. There is no scene where the film changes genre. You simply notice, twenty minutes late, that you are watching a horror picture and have been for a while.

The ancestor

Everybody reaches for Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and the hagsploitation cycle, and the Gothic house and the trapped bodies are certainly in the family. But The Beguiled’s real ancestor is The Innocents (1961), Jack Clayton’s James adaptation — a great house, a closed female world, a repression so total it becomes supernatural, and a photographic scheme built on candlelight and deep black that Surtees is unmistakably answering. Both films are about what happens when desire has no permitted exit and finds an improvised one.

The other ancestor is Val Lewton’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943), which put a nurse in a plantation house in a country built on slavery and let the moral rot of the place express itself as dread. Siegel’s film is the American cousin: the seminary is a slave society in miniature, Hallie is standing in it, and the picture’s willingness to let her say so — that these people are not her people and this war is not her war — is what stops the Gothic from being merely decorative.

Siegel’s own back catalogue supplies the third thread. He had already made the definitive American film about a community quietly turning into something predatory, and he made another one here with the pods removed. His noir craft is on show in The Lineup: Siegel’s San Francisco courier noir, and The Beguiled sits comfortably inside the darker turn of the era mapped in Why the 1970s was horror’s greatest decade and The New Hollywood paranoia cycle — a paranoid picture whose conspiracy is a dinner table.

Sofia Coppola remade it in 2017 and won Best Director at Cannes for it, which is a useful case study in what a remake chooses to drop. Her version is cooler, more elegant, more sympathetic to the women, and it removes Hallie entirely. Siegel’s film is uglier and knows more.

The case against

The film has a genuine problem with its own appetites. Siegel shoots the seminary’s younger students with an interest that the material does not require and the picture does not examine, and the sequence involving Carol has a leer in it that sits badly against the film’s otherwise cold intelligence. The picture is about a predator and it occasionally shares his eyeline without comment.

The Martha fantasy sequence is a swing that misses. It is startling, it is beautifully shot, and it introduces a suggestion about her past that the film has no intention of developing, so it functions as sensation rather than structure.

And the last act moves fast enough to bruise. Decisions that should take a scene take a look, and a picture that spent an hour on patient pressure spends its final twenty minutes on outcomes. Whether that is compression or nerve is a fair argument.

The verdict

The Beguiled is Siegel’s best film and one of the few American Gothics that earns the comparison to the great British ones, and its failure in 1971 is entirely explicable: Universal had a star built on invulnerability and a film about what invulnerability is made of, and no poster can hold both. The picture is poisonous, controlled, superbly acted by Geraldine Page, and it does something almost no star vehicle has ever done, which is to take the star apart while he cooperates.

The film’s coldest insight is that McBurney’s charm and his violence are the same faculty operating at different temperatures. He is a man who reads a room and gives it what it wants, and when the room stops wanting things he has one register left. Siegel makes you like him for an hour first. That is the trap, and you are in it.

Watch it before the Coppola, which is a fine film about different questions. It circulates in restored editions and turns up on the streamers carrying the Universal library; the transfer matters more than usual, because Surtees shot it at the bottom of the exposure range and a bad copy turns the house to sludge.

Spoilers below

McBurney’s play collapses because he runs all three cons in the same house on the same night. Having promised himself to Edwina, he is caught with Carol; Edwina, in the ensuing struggle, sends him down the stairs and his damaged leg is wrecked.

Martha amputates it. Whether the surgery was necessary is the question the film builds its entire second half on, and Siegel gives you exactly enough to be unsure — she consults a medical book, she moves fast, she has just watched him choose someone else. Eastwood’s performance after he wakes is the best work in the picture: the charm is gone, the tools are gone, and what is underneath is a violent, frightened man with a pistol and nothing to bargain with. He terrorises the house, and the house, having been terrorised, becomes a committee.

The end is a dinner. The women decide, more or less collectively and almost without discussion, and Amy — the child who found him in the woods — is sent for mushrooms. McBurney, restored to his charm and believing he has talked his way back in, eats what he is given.

The final shot is the women carrying a body in a sheet out through the gates, to be left for the army to collect, and then walking back into the house. Nobody weeps. There is no reckoning and no discovery. Siegel’s last image is of a household resuming its routine, and the horror is entirely in the tidiness of it: the seminary absorbed him, used him, disposed of him and went back to lessons. The predator walked into a building full of people who had been surviving a war on their own for years, and he never once considered that they might be better at this than he was.