Clint Eastwood (47 page)

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.

But manner aside, isn’t there something quite unexceptionable at the core of his argument? As modernists, as feminist sympathizers, aren’t we obliged to accord women equality in evil as in all things? As realists, aren’t we obliged to acknowledge the tension, verging at times on hatred, that exists between the sexes and is, indeed, the crux of much drama and fiction? In the particular case of
The Beguiled
, wouldn’t it be more useful (and more accurate) to read it not as a narrowly misogynistic work, but as a broadly misanthropic one?

In fact, it balances its admittedly dark vision of femininity with an equally devastating portrayal of masculine nature. McBurney may have entered this female web through mischance, but he always imagines, in his male egotism, that he can escape full and fatal entrapment in it and,
indeed, turn the misfortunes of war into good fortune. “You know,” says Clint, “he’s totally justifiable. What guy wouldn’t try to save his life in a situation like that?” And then, “With seven girls hauling you around on a stretcher say, ‘Hey, well, I’ll grab a little nookie while I’m here, and who cares?’ ”

As a man who was himself used to taking his sexual pleasure when and where it presented itself (he had an affair with one of the women in this cast), Clint understood his character as entirely typical of his sex, succumbing “to what we all succumb to through life, which gets us all into trouble”—that is to blind, and in this case fatal, instinct. In that condition, “A man’s brain has a way of lowering itself down out of the cranium, down into”—he pauses, searching not entirely successfully for a genteelism—“the lower extremities.” Thus, as these women come to represent the male’s darkest fantasies about the opposite sex, he comes to represent the female’s darkest fantasies about the footloose and feckless male: at best, a casual user of her body and careless abuser of her trust; at worst, a cock of the walk to whom any woman is but the unearned entitlement of unearned status.

For him, then, this is, finally, the story of a fucker fucked, possibly even a projection of retributive fears he may have known. And its conclusion represents for him an ironic, unpleasant, but in no sense tragic, comeuppance, more final than those usually meted out to the sexually restless, but not different in spirit from them. This role, permitting him as an actor to be both more voluble and more overtly sexual than he had ever been before, also encouraged him to subvert not only his own image but the standard leading-man image common to most movies, blending it, if you will, with second-lead caddishness.

Still, without denying that
The Beguiled
presents a particularly vivid portrayal of a particularly deadly engagement in the war between the sexes, Clint offers another reading of it that is, so far as one can tell, unique to him. He suggests that the film is about the mysterious workings of blind faith. Rather surprisingly, he analogizes it to
Unforgiven
. In the later movie it is wildly exaggerated rumors of unspeakable violence visited on a woman that drive and justify Will Munny’s mission of vengeance, a series of misapprehensions and mischances, their effects heightened by the violent, near-anarchic context in which they occur, that brings everyone to grief. Something similar, he argues, is going on here.

In normal times, Clint suggests, McBurney might not be a bad guy. He certainly would not be a guy whose goodness or badness, strengths and weaknesses, would ever seriously be tested by circumstances. Imagine him in peacetime as, say, an itinerant peddler taking refuge from a
storm at Miss Farnsworth’s place. He might or might not in such an instance find himself in bed with one of the ladies. But early the next morning he would move on, having created nothing more consequential than some sort of traveling-salesman joke. Or write the scenario from the women’s point of view: In peacetime Miss Farnsworth and her charges would offer the beset traveler gracious, flirtatious “Southern hospitality,” and if, perchance, something more than that innocent interchange occurred, it would be resolutely denied and, again, he would be waved off without regret.

But in this case such easy escapes are impossible. Because he is caught behind enemy lines his movements are restricted, and because the military situation is fluid, it is quite rational for the women to want to keep a man around the place and for him to stay put until he is rescued by his fellow Yankees. Having been thrown together by the combined workings of chance and megahistorical forces—by fate, in other words—they are then held together by them, in the process “bringing out the worst of himself and the worst of them, too.”