The Beguiled (1971)

Some time back, I picked up a box set of Clint Eastwood movies. (Actually, it's a repackaging of two box sets, one of westerns and one of dramas.) One of the movies I hadn't blogged about before is The Beguiled. Even though it's not really a western, it's going to be on StarzEncore Westerns tomorrow at 5:38 AM and 12:14 PM.

Eastwood is the star, although he's not the first person we meet. Instead, that's little Amy (Pamelyn Ferdin). She's wandering through the forest picking mushrooms, when she comes upon a man who's in terrible shape. That man is Eastwood, playing John McBurney. McBurney is a soldier in the Union Army in the Civil War, and Amy is a student as Miss Farnsworth's Seminary for Young Girls, located somewhere in Louisiana. (Location shooting for The Beguiled was, in fact, done in Louisiana.) This of course is a problem since Louisiana was part of the Confederacy.

Amy, not being certain what to do, takes the wounded solder back to the school, where Miss Farnsworth (Geraldine Page) is none too pleased. Don't you know that it's dangerous to go outside school grounds with a war on and marauding Union soldiers getting closer and closer to the school? With any luck, the Confederate patrollers are going to come along soon and they can all turn McBurney over to the patrollers, who will take McBurney to a POW camp where he'll surely die, if he doesn't die before he gets there.

But then, these are women, and they have moral qualms about being that cruel to a wounded man, even if he's fighting for the other side in a war. Perhaps they can at least deal with his injuries before turning him over to the Confederates. With that in mind, Miss Farnsworth, along with the one other teacher Edwina (Elisabeth Hartman), together with the student body of six and the one slave still staying on, set McBurney up in the music room to convalesce.

Of course, you can probably guess what happens next. Some of the girls are too young to have ever been this close to a man, while the few grownups haven't been around a man in a long time, what with the war on. The closest Miss Farnsworth got was having an older brother. We only see him in flashback, and there's some insinuation that there was an incestuous relationship going on, along with the brother having sex with the slave. No wonder Miss Farnsworth seems to have warped views of sex.

McBurney, for his part, plans to use the women's squabbling over him to his advantage, as he wants to get out of here with his health intact. Or at least as intact as possible considering how badly off he was when little Amy found him. Unfortunately, there's enough conflict between the women that some decide something has to be done about him.

The Beguiled, is an interesting picture from Clint Eastwood, and one that as I said I wouldn't quite call a western. Just because it's the Civil War in a fairly rural place doesn't make it a western. It's more of a straight drama, with some possible tinges of horror, albeit not of the supernatural kind. The entire cast is quite good, and the ending, which I won't reveal, was quite surprising. If you haven't seen The Beguiled before, it's well worth watching.

The Beguiled was remade a few years back, but the listings say it's the Clint Eastwood version. That's something else to note if you're looking for it on DVD or streaming.