The Beguiled

Long before a lame drunk starts pointing a Flintlock pistol at startled school children, Don Siegel's The Beguiled is a siege film, one premised on hopeless, wartime longing and the incompatible desires experienced in unequal relationships. Clint Eastwood plays John McBurney, a grievously wounded Union soldier being nursed back to health by a half-dozen women in a Confederate sympathising seminary school. McB - so called by Pamelyn Ferdin's Amy, the (apparently) guileless adolescent who discovers his burnt-up, bleeding body - is Eastwood at his most louche, a bed-ridden stud pouring syrup into the ears of anyone who'll listen. He's arrogant and conceited, completely assured that his good looks and treacly manners will allow him to behave as he pleases. The women who fall under his spell, Geraldine Page's middle-aged headmistress; Elizabeth Hartman's virginal schoolteacher; and Jo Ann Harris' precocious teenager, each vie for this plucked rooster's attention. Variously, they extend offers of a salaried position, romantic love and, simply, sex as a way to secure their place in his affections. 

Siegel's film, adapted from Thomas P. Cullinan's novel by screenwriters Albert Maltz and Irene Kamp, uses bursts of memory and whispered thoughts to reveal the ways in which these people appraise themselves and each other. McB and Page's Martha - the characters experienced enough to actually have a past - exert themselves on the film using the former. While McB talks up his affinity for these untamed Southern lands we catch a glimpse of him, pre-injury and beaming ear to ear, as he sets crops alight. Before he was blasted into repose, McB experienced war as an adventure, one curtailed by his near fatal injuries. Martha recalls the last time she had an opportunity to roll around with a handsome man, and the shame she attaches to that relationship. We hear the hurried thoughts of the other women as they catalogue the school's ever-evolving relationships. Each one capable of incisive and pitiless assessment. There's a breaking point in The Beguiled though, an amputation performed under dubious pretext, after which all decorum is dropped. McB, having regained some mobility, rants and crashes about the house; desperately trying to cower these women and children. The revenge that sees his lifeless body sewn into a burlap bag is engineered, almost entirely, by the twelve year old who discovered him though. Amy, an overlooked but no less jealous member of the household, repaying Eastwood's brute for his boozed-up thrashings.