The Beguiled

Undeniably creepy. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about 'The Beguiled', though.

It's definitely one of the more bizarre films that I've seen, intentionally so of course. I'm just not convinced if it's a good film though, it does do a grand job at making the viewer feel uncomfortable but beyond that I'm not sold. Take out the oddness and there's not much there, I feel.

With that said, it undoubtedly leaves an imprint and does what it intends to so I guess it levels out to be something worth watching. Clint Eastwood gives an almost eerily convincing performance, while those behind him are all solid - with the standouts, to me, being Geraldine Page and Mae Mercer.

It's certainly 'out there', you gotta give it that. Overall I have mixed feelings, but I am leaning closer to positive than negative.

Anatomy of manipulation

In 1971, Donald Siegel delivered one of the most fascinating, atypical, and dark works of American cinema of that decade. With astonishing audacity, he managed to subvert the tropes of the war genre and the Western to venture into the realms of psychological thriller and Southern Gothic.

The story is set in 1864, during the final stages of the American Civil War; there, John McBurney, a severely wounded Union Army corporal, is rescued by Amy, a young girl from the nearby Farnsworth Seminary. This girls' boarding school, surviving in absolute isolation under Confederate territory, becomes the setting for a dense chamber drama after the strict headmistress, Martha Farnsworth, and the timid teacher, Edwina Dabney, decide to shelter the enemy soldier under the guise of Christian charity and medical care before turning him over to local patrols.

The arrival of this mature, attractive, and mysterious man at a mansion inhabited exclusively by women of different ages—doomed to frustration, loneliness, and rigid sexual repression—acts as a violent psychological catalyst. Fully aware of his fragile predicament, McBurney decides to use manipulation and deceit as survival tools, orchestrating a subtle game of seduction tailored down to the millimeter to the emotional voids of each of his hostesses.

Unfortunately overshadowed by the runaway success of "Dirty Harry", released the same year by the same director, "The Beguiled" stands out, in retrospect, as the artistic pinnacle of the fruitful collaboration between Siegel and Eastwood. Tarantino aptly went as far as to define it as the closest Siegel ever came to making an auteur film, and the piece completely justifies that status thanks to a bold mise-en-scène that progressively dismantles the physical, unshakeable masculinity that Eastwood usually projected on the big screen. His performance is daring and superb, shedding the traditional hero role to embody an opportunistic parasite whose...