Metrograph

Rooster-in-the-hen house Eastwood gets taken down a peg (and a leg) by the residents of Miss Martha Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies in Siegel’s seamy Southern Gothic psychological thriller, based on Thomas P. Cullinan’s 1966 novel of the same title, later adapted by Sofia Coppola. Eastwood’s Union soldier John “McBee” McBurney, grievously wounded behind enemy lines in the tropical Mississippi brush, finds sanctuary at an all-girl boarding school run by an imperious Geraldine Page and, not long after the roguish “Bluebelly” finds himself well enough to start pitching woo to pupils and staff alike, he learns the meaning of the phrase “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” The least commercially successful of the Eastwood/Siegel collaborations, and the one least easily categorized along genre lines, maintaining a smothering, hothouse air of mephitic, blighted sensuality that Tennessee Williams himself might have envied. Screens with The Beguiled: The Storyteller, Eastwood’s 12-minute directorial debut—if you don’t count the one scene in Dirty Harry he filled in on—paying homage to his director and mentor, shot during the filming of The Beguiled in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Preceded by The Beguiled: The Storyteller (1971)

Distributor: Universal