Blu-ray Review: Don Siegel’s The Beguiled on KL Studio Classics

Given the general timidity of modern cinema, Don Siegel’s The Beguiled probably feels more shocking today than it did in 1971. Siegel and screenwriters Albert Matlz and Irene Camp play with many uncomfortable aspects of contemporary American society, piercing taboos in a bold, lurid manner that suggests a clearing of the air. The narrative is set on a Mississippi plantation during the Civil War where Martha Farnsworth (Geraldine Page) runs a fading girls’ seminary. In one of the film’s best jokes, which subtly embodies its entire theme, Martha teaches a handful of girls and young women etiquette while men blow each other to pieces a few miles away. As society succumbs to its roiling hatred of itself, the girls learn how to wipe their faces with napkins the right way during dinner. This juxtaposition is a brilliant metaphor for the way people, especially now, sanitize truth with platitude.

The films’ young women are going nuts with suppressed instincts—so horny that they’re ready to scratch one another’s eyes out. Entering into this caldron is Corporal John McBurney, or McBee (Clint Eastwood), a shot-up Union soldier on the brink of death who’s discovered by one of the girls, Amy (Pamelyn Ferdin), while she’s gathering mushrooms outside the plantation. Amy and McBee hide in the bushes while Confederate soldiers ride by, and the delirious fortysomething-ish man gives the 12-year-old girl a lingering kiss on the lips. This purposefully jolting moment is amplified by Siegel’s casual staging and, particularly, by his refusal to shirk away from Amy’s own reaction, which is stunned though not without an element of disbelieving pleasure. This is one of many examples of The Beguiled’s refusal to take the easy way out, homing in instead on queasy dimensions of human desire.

Amy brings McBee back to the plantation, which he instantly destabilizes. The women, of course, are Confederates, and they talk of alerting nearby units so that McBee may be taken to a prison, though they clearly want this handsome man to themselves, and they use his injuries as a rationalization for doing just that. If he were to go to prison now, they insist, he would die from his wounds. It would be more Christian to treat him first and then let him rot away in prison—a logic that serves as an instance of sanitizing need, and eventual atrocity, with bullshit. As McBee gradually heals, he comes into his own and sets about sexually manipulating four of the women. In short, he’s a rooster in a hen house—a notion that’s almost literalized by one of the film’s many sexual symbols and innuendos: Once McBee arrives, the hens in the farm out back start laying eggs.

The women want to eat McBee alive, but they’re tormented by ideas of what’s ladylike, as well as by McBee’s enemy alliance, and these conflicts forge a latticework of neuroses. In the film’s most daring scenes, McBee hits on Hallie (Mae Mercer), the slave of the plantation. As Hallie disparages McBee as “Mr. Yank,” the filmmakers have the nerve to allow him to say what many people in the audience are thinking: “We should be on the same side.” Hallie’s response—devastating, practical, dependent on the use of a forbidden word—detonates homilies about the Civil War. Hallie’s loyalty to the women, and the unusual authority she enjoys at the plantation, trump political ideas that strike her as justifying abstractions. Such a scene, complicated further by the profound sexual chemistry between Mercer and Eastwood, and by the ever-present potentialities for violence existing between Hallie and McBee, shames the hindsight sermonizing of many contemporary “issues” movies.

The compulsory timidity of so many modern movies is encapsulated by Sofia Coppola’s 2017 remake of The Beguiled. Coppola, probably correctly intuiting that Hallie would be “problematic” for modern audiences, omitted the character in an act of artistic cowardice. With Hallie, who most painfully embodies the narrative’s obsession with the chasm between personal wants and social demands, gone, the new film feels neutered. The glossy production values and use of celebrities in many of the female roles further sanitize Coppola’s film. By contrast, Siegel’s production values are feverish, dirty, raw—the soldiers here don’t appear to come from central casting—and his claustrophobic, hallucinatory setups heighten our understanding of the yearning of the women, who’re mostly played by unknowns who exhibit a naturalness that only further explodes the film’s gloriously disreputable eroticism.

The Beguiled features one of Eastwood’s best and riskiest performances, which served as a turning point from his (also unsentimental) action heroes of the ’60s into more ambiguous characters and films. As McBee, Eastwood really leans into his mercenary sexuality, intensifying one of the narrative’s chief pleasures: the mystery as to how much of McBee’s manipulations are driven by an urge to survive versus horny male opportunism. In the extremism of war, these urges are essentially understood to be one in the same, as social chaos enables the indulgence of individual gluttony. Yet Eastwood doesn’t just do a cock-of-the-walk routine, as he’s intimately receptive to all of his female costars, little girls and older women alike. In fact, Eastwood has rarely had the sort of kinship with other performers that he has here. It’s a shame that The Beguiled is generally considered as an also-ran entry in Eastwood’s career, though this oversight is also perhaps a sign of the skittishness of modern cinema.

Image/Sound

The Beguiled abounds in candlelit scenes and brown hues that have often come across as indistinct on prior home-video editions, which this new 4K restoration beautifully corrects. The colors here are quite lucid; the blacks are especially luscious, and the browns are sharp and well-differentiated. Facial and clothing textures are also very prominent, while grain is healthy and attractive. The soundtrack is sharp and balanced, which is especially evident in the vivacious presentation of Lalo Schifrin’s moody and self-consciously melodramatic score.

Extras

In a new audio commentary, film historian Kat Ellinger riffs in erudite, free-associative fashion on a variety of subjects pertaining to The Beguiled. Ellinger reads from Don Siegel’s autobiography to offer insights into the making of the film, which was a passion project for him and Clint Eastwood, and she connects its female-centric narrative to ’70s-era horror films at large that pivoted on violations of women and their aftermath. Ellinger is also persuasive when discussing the film’s gothic atmosphere and its stubborn, intriguing singularity. In a new interview, actress Melody Scott Thomas, who plays Abigail, elaborates on how she met Siegel and what it was like to work with Eastwood and all the women in an intense film as a relative newcomer. Meanwhile, an archive featurette, “The Beguiled, Misty, Don, and Clint,” provides a very brief overview of the formative year that Siegel and Eastwood had in 1971 with the release of The Beguiled, Dirty Harry, and Play Misty for Me. A “Trailers from Hell” segment with John Landis and a smorgasbord of other trailers round out a slim-ish package.

Overall

Kino outfits Don Siegel’s underrated gothic masterpiece, a pivotal work in his and Clint Eastwood’s careers, with an appropriately luscious restoration.