The Beguiled (1971)

A Southern Gothic psychosexual melodrama adapted from the 1966 novel by Thomas P. Cullinan. Siegel, best known for tough, unsentimental genre pictures like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), The Killers (1964), and Dirty Harry (1971), approaches this material with a markedly different direction. While traces of his economical style remain, The Beguiled pushes him into stranger, more claustrophobic territory. He had already worked with Eastwood on several films by this point, and their collaboration here trades the usual macho posturing for something more psychologically driven. Siegel considered it among his finest work, even as it flopped commercially on release, misunderstood by audiences expecting a war picture or a straightforward romance.

Eastwood plays a wounded Union soldier during the American Civil War who is taken in by an all-girls school run by Confederate women. There is decadence lurking beneath the surface of the prim-and-proper institution. Every woman in the house, from the headmistress down to the youngest student, harbors some private hunger that his presence brings out.

Eastwood’s character, Corporal John “McBee” McBurney, plays a dangerous game of manipulation and ultimately suffers the consequences of his actions in a finale as cold as anything in Siegel’s filmography. In the process, not a character is left unmarred. The women and girls who took him in are transformed by the experience as thoroughly as he is, each one exposed, then altered, by what his arrival brought to the surface.