Clint Eastwood (46 page)

Possibly so. Nothing focuses Clint’s outrage like an authority figure trying to patronize him. One of the studio chief’s main arguments for haste was that he had to get the sixteen-millimeter prints for armed forces distribution out by a certain date or the studio would be “in big trouble.” Clint couldn’t believe it, nor should he have. These prints represented pennies; he was talking about changes in the picture and its marketing that might have meant millions to the studio. The best Clint could obtain from Aubrey was a promise to think over his arguments, but he never heard back from him, and the movie opened on the production chief’s timetable.

Kelly’s Heroes
returned only about $600,000 more in rentals than the competing
Two Mules for Sister Sara
, which had cost considerably less. Nor was it a critical success. Most reviewers simply noted its mixed means and motives and passed unimpassioned negative judgments on it. Roger Greenspun unconsciously lent belated support to Clint’s argumerits
when he observed that when the bank caper began to result in a substantial amount of killing, “
the film has no resources above the conventional antagonistic ironies and comradely pieties of most war movies.” He said that because it so easily accepts the idea that its subject is not war but “burglary masquerading as war,” the film “becomes a denial of moral perception that depresses the mind and bewilders the imagination.”

In a way this was
Paint Your Wagon
all over again, though on a smaller scale, with less extensive personal acrimony. Once again a studio had been trying to have it both ways, making a traditional genre film but at the same time giving it a hip, countercultural spin. The industry seemingly could not grasp the fact that there were now two distinct audiences out there, each of them potentially profitable, but not to be confused, not to be appealed to simultaneously.

There was sometimes advantage to be found in this confusion, for the industry was momentarily willing to take chances on certain marginal enterprises—who knew what the next
Easy Rider
might look like? And Universal had in hand something that was, in its way, just as curious, something out of the Hollywood mainstream and off what everyone assumed was Clint’s main line. Though it would not be generally recognized as such, it would become, at least in Clint’s mind, the first clear, public signal of his resolve to carve out a career path that could not be confused with that of any other Hollywood star.

“I wasn’t sure an audience was ready for that, or wanted that, but I knew I wanted it,” Clint says of
The Beguiled
. He wanted it because it was a strange and complex story, because it was such a totally unexpected vehicle for him and for the best and simplest of reasons—because it was “something I could act, something besides just gunning people down.”

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 for 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.