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When we last met Clint Eastwood, 1964’s A Fistful of Dollars was about to thrust him to superstardom, and change the shape of the Western forever. In the years immediately following, no actor was more responsible for overseeing the genre’s changing of the guard. After the Dollars trilogy, he pivoted between modes for a little while, following grim revenge tale Hang ‘em High with one Western that was also a musical (Paint Your Wagon) and another that was more or less a rom-com (Two Mules for Sister Sara). By the time 1971’s The Beguiled rolled around however, he’d well and truly cut ties with the old way of doing things.
1863, rural Mississippi. Out picking mushrooms one day, 12-year-old Amy (Pamelyn Ferdin) discovers a severely injured Yankee soldier, McBurney (Clint Eastwood). She takes him back to the Confederate girls boarding school where she lives. Headteacher Martha (Geraldine Page) agrees to shelter him until he is well enough to hand over to the authorities.
Well aware that he’s in mortal danger, and also that there are no other men at the school, McBurney sets about wooing the various staff and students from his sick bed, hoping that when it comes down to it, they’ll be too enamored to turn him in. His plan works swimmingly at first, but when one of the girls catches him with another, the resultant storm leads to bloody catastrophe.
The Beguiled is the most atypical Western we’ll be talking about this month. For one thing, it’s not set in the West. There are no cowboys or Native Americans. Almost all the action occurs within the grounds of the Miss Martha Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies; outside there are cypress trees, not cacti.
As much as anything, besides the presence of Eastwood, it was the mid-19th century setting that has settled the Don Siegel feature somewhat uneasily into the canon. The genre was obsessed with the effect the Civil War had on the life of the nation, on an intimate and an epic scale, regularly either setting films in the war, or making time as a soldier an important part of the characters’ backstories (this is true of both 3:10 to Yuma and Stagecoach). That McBurney finds himself in Mississippi here is almost beside the point (and indeed in Sofia Coppola’s 2017 version, it’s Virginia); in nearly dividing the country, the Civil War united it in turmoil, and the Western was intimately concerned with how that affected those who had fought, and whose lives were never going to be the same again.
Siegel was rampantly, unrepentantly misogynistic. He’d say that The Beguiled was about, “the basic desire of women to castrate men.” He’d say “The Beguiled is…not a picture for women, but about them.” Nevertheless, at least watching today, his film does seem to have a measure of empathy for its female characters (it’s worth noting that one of the screenwriters was a woman, Irene Kamp, though like her co-scribe Albert Maltz, she used a pseudonym). Eastwood’s McBurney is cruel in his manipulation, surgically pinpointing the weakness of his targets and exploiting them for his own satisfaction. When he erupts during the third act, his true, ugly, violent nature seems to justify the rather extreme measures the staff and students take to keep themselves safe.
Another feature of the Siegel movie that appears to belie his misogyny is the character of Hallie, played by the excellent Mae Mercer. While Westerns were fascinated by the Civil War, they rarely confronted what the war was fought about. Hallie is an enslaved woman living and working at the school, and the only person who has the measure of McBurney from the get-go. Which is not to say she’s unsusceptible to his charms; when she’s shaving the bed-bound man early in the film, she does indulge in a little flirting. But when he tries to find common ground with her based on their comparable statuses as “prisoners,” she replies coolly, nodding at his injured limb, “I can run.” Throughout the movie she’s self-assured and steady, much more so than the white women who surround her.
There is no Hallie in Sofia Coppola’s version. The omission of the story’s sole Black character caused an understandable stir upon its release. Coppola explained, “I didn’t want to brush over such an important topic in a light way. Young girls watch my films and this was not a depiction of an African-American character I wanted to show them.” Although the honest acknowledgement that she did not feel capable of doing justice to the portrayal of an enslaved woman is arguably admirable, when you watch the two films back-to-back, the lack of Hallie in the remake certainly leaves a void.
Siegel’s The Beguiled treats Eastwood as the protagonist, with most of the events happening through his eyes. In Coppola’s, Colin Farrell’s McBurney is far less prominent. Whereas Eastwood can be animalistic in his seething sexuality, Farrell is gentler. He takes his time more, waiting to learn the lay of the land before he makes any big moves.
And the way the men cast a pall over their stories is symptomatic of the whole films. The original is wild and lurid and over-sexed. The 2017 version is restrained and elegant, with the urges of the women smothered beneath the layers of material in the dresses they wear to impress their unexpected visitor. In the first movie, when the moment comes for some impromptu surgery on McBurney, we see more than we may want to. In the second, the camera coyly cuts away after Martha commands, “Bring me the anatomy books!”
In a sense, this reluctance to show overt violence or sexuality hastens back to the strictures of the classic era. And yet, in another, Coppola’s vision presents a different kind of positive forward momentum. She shows us more of the day-to-day life of the female staff and students at the school, their lessons and their downtime, so we feel keenly how the arrival of this unexpected man has disturbed their cosseted world. In a genre where women almost exclusively exist in terms of their relationship to a man, not on their own terms, Coppola dedicating a considerable about of screentime to depicting them in the garden or preparing meals together or chatting before they go to sleep represents a kind of quiet rebellion.
Nevertheless, the 2017 movie also shows that such positive change doesn’t invariably sweep everyone along with it. Even in a profoundly atypical Western, far removed from the toxic machismo of Siegel and Eastwood, dedicated to privileging the perspective of women so often sidelined in the genre’s classic era, Coppola’s decision to write out the character of Hallie demonstrates that, unfortunately, there’s always room for other avenues of exclusion.
Next week: from an atypical Western to one of the most classic of all—we end this month with two versions of True Grit.
Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.