Film #120: Play Misty For Me

I have a vague idea why Clint Eastwood's Play Misty For Me is such a sentimental favorite of mine; I think it was one of the first horror movies I ever caught on the big screen (its original title, by the way, was The Slasher). But, seeing it now, Play Misty For Me is really only decent in very limited ways--a rarity among Eastwood-directed projects. The iconic actor debuted as a feature filmmaker with this 1971 horror movie that's obviously a progenitor to Adrian Lyne's more famous (and classier) Fatal Attraction. To wit: Eastwood plays a successful man--a smooth jazz disc jockey in Carmel, California--who finds himself bedeviled by a lovestruck wackadoo (Jessica Walter).

Here's where the problems begin--for the film's characters, and for the film itself. Eastwood's Dave Garver is supposed to be a player in the bedroom, but somehow he can't see that it's a mistake for him to ever get involved with this crazy woman. Evelyn begins their relationship mired in deception; this should have been his warning sign #1. Though they meet as "strangers" at his local watering hole, she conceals her identity from him--recognizing her voice, he finds out quickly she's the woman who's been calling him at the station, requesting Errol Garner's "Misty" every night. Okay, that's weird enough right there...but Davey-boy can't help letting the little head think for the big one. So they sleep together. Big mistake.

Soon, she's showing up unannounced at his hep, 70s-ed-out seaside pad, ready to make elaborate steak dinners for him. She lurks around in the seaside brush, following him on dates with his true love (Donna Mills), and even bursts in angrily as he's conducting an important business lunch (in one of the movie's best scenes; the film really perks up when Walters lets Evelyn get GODDAMN angry). Dave's pretty much had enough of her quite early on but, dammit, she won't get a clue. I guess this is before the time the law had the concept of "restraining orders" down, but Dave's reluctance to report her insanity to the police is nevertheless frustrating for the viewer. Eventually, things have to get much more nasty before Eastwood takes hold of the situation; when he does, the revenge is tasty but is meted out too quickly to be satisfying (SPOILER: Clint exposes of her with one punch). But Jessica Walter does such a yeoman's job of creating this clingy, frothing monster that we wanna see her get a little more stinging torture dealt to her.Still, Jessica Walter is superb in it; she makes you really wanna choke this woman's guts out (she's the film's star attraction, although the screenplay is not fair to her character; we never really get to know anything about her). The movie has other merits. Bruce Surtees' inky black photography is, as always, superb, and Alexander Golitzen's art direction is shabbily fancy (I love Dave's confusing, slightly sloppy place). We get to see footage of Carmel, the town which Eastwood called home for many years, and for which he was, in fact, elected mayor in the late 1980s. It's novel, also, seeing director Don Siegel (Dirty Harry, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, pictured right) being given marching orders by his famous protege; Siegel portrays Dave's favorite bartender (they humorously play an inscrutable--and wholly imaginary--game at the beginning of the movie called "Cry Bastion"). Also, Roberta Flack's Grammy-winning "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" makes for a backing track to a pretty, if inconsequential, love scene between Eastwood and Mills. Finally, I really get a kick out of seeing Eastwood in late-nite DJ mode; in another world, he would've made a excellent record-spinner, equipped with that FM-lite whisper of his. A thorny look at 70s sexual politics, Play Misty For Me has its pluses, but its implausible screenplay isn't one of them (it was co-written by Dean Riesner, who probably only polished Jo Heims original script; he authored better work on three other Don Siegel productions: Coogan's Bluff, Dirty Harry, and Charley Varrick). Still, it has enough of that good ol' 70s charm to be immanently watchable, at least once.

Film #78: Coogan's Bluff

1968's Coogan's Bluff, whether you've heard of it or not, is a deceptively historic movie. It brought Clint Eastwood out of the western milieu he'd been so well-known for through his TV series Rawhide and his Spaghetti Western cycle with Italian director Sergio Leone (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good The Bad & The Ugly), and into the streets of U.S. cities like New York (Coogan's Bluff), San Francisco (the Dirty Harry cycle), Phoenix (The Gauntlet), and New Orleans (Tightrope).
And it brought director Don Siegel back to the forefront of American directors (that is, after the French film magazine Cahiers Du Cinema had already vetted him in the 1960s). TV director Alex Segal (Playhouse 90) was first at the helm of Coogan's Bluff, but later producer Jennings Lang (who went on to help out with Eastwood's High Plains Drifter and Play Misty For Me, as well as with disaster epics like Airport '75, Earthquake, and Rollercoaster) felt a quicker, more no-nonsense director was needed for the project. Fortunately, the great director Don Siegel was under contract to Lang's company, Universal, and thus a lucrative collaboration between Eastwood and Siegel was afoot--a collaboration that would lead Eastwood to dedicate his 1992 Oscar winner Unforgiven to both Sergio Leone and Don Siegel.

If one reads about Eastwood's and Siegel's directorial senses, one would find that they are quite similar: as Eastwood biographer Richard Schickel puts it "[Siegel] was Clint's kind of guy: a decisive filmmaker who didn't waste time, words, or film on the set." Any examination of any actor's experiences with the director Eastwood--Morgan Freeman, Hillary Swank, Charlie Sheen, Kevin Spacey, and the casts of Letters from Iwo Jima, Flags of Our Fathers, High Plains Drifter, White Hunter Black Heart, Bird, Play Misty For Me, Breezy, or Mystic River (and those are all huge casts)--will turn up commentaries about Eastwood's fair, effective, but no-nonsense, one- or two-take approach to filmmaking (his films are legendary in Hollywood for coming in under- or on-schedule and under- or on-budget).

Even before they met, Eastwood and Siegel needed each other. Eastwood required Siegel's know-how. But Siegel hungered for the power of Eastwood's fame and name. We should remember: in 1956, Siegel completed the classic sci-fi/sociological study Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which has, as of 2008, been remade three times: as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 78), Body Snatchers (Abel Ferrara, 93) and The Invasion (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 07).

This HAS to be a record over the course of 50 years. Name me one movie that has been remade almost every decade since the original has hit the screens. Believe me, you can't. Obviously the original Siegel-directed Invasion of the Body Snatchers is an influential movie. But after Siegel made that movie, he was offered NOTHING. This is clearly a political response to Siegel's incendiary, left-leaning work about the negatives of unconsidered conformism in the light of the Cold War Communist scare. But, regardless of his ever-so-slight blackballing, Siegel kept going, through B-movies and TV-films (including 1964's originally TV-bound remake of 1946's The Killers, staring Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, and Ronald Reagan--in his last role, as a villain).

When it came time for Coogan's Bluff to be made, producer Lang had obviously hit on something perfect. As a result of Lang's suggestion, Eastwood watched some of Siegel's 1950s films and liked them. He'd also heard (from actor/director Mark Rydell, of On Golden Pond and The Cowboys fame) that Siegel was a director who could get things done in a hurry. Siegel, meanwhile, watched and loved Eastwood's Italian films done with Leone. In 1967, the two men met in Carmel, California (the same town that of which Eastwood would eventually become mayor in 1986). According to Siegel, they discussed "dames, golf, dames, the glorious weather" and then, once Siegel was called quickly back to Hollywood, the team quietly decided that they could certainly work together, and all of this happened without the two having discussed very much about their first film together.

When all was said and done, Coogan's Bluff turned out to be an entertaining fish-out-of-water actioner that had Clint playing a horse-ridin', cowboy-hat-wearin' Arizona cop who storms New York City in pursuit of an on-the-lam bad-guy headcase played by Don Stroud (who later reteamed with Eastwood in 1971's Joe Kidd) Co-star Lee J. Cobb (12 Angry Men, The Exorcist and Death of a Salesman's original Willy Loman, on Broadway and on film) was his usual grumpy self as the NYC detective whose work habits clash with Coogan's rough, no-Miranda-rights method of law enforcement.

A suitable precursor to Eastwood's more violent later work with Siegel (including Two Mules for Sister Sara, The Beguiled, Dirty Harry, and Escape from Alcatraz), Coogan's Bluff was later shamelessly ripped off by the creators of NBC's Emmy-winning hit TV series McCloud, starring Dennis Weaver in the acclaimed lead role. The TV series failed to even credit Herman Miller, the writer of the original novel and screenplay to Coogan's Bluff. Still, to this day, this is inexplicable and unforgivable, as anyone who see both the movie and the TV series can easily attest.

An appreciator of Coogan's Bluff--mind you, an incredibly engrossing movie--cannot forget the contribution of Don Stroud. As a result of his outstanding performance as Eastwood's nemesis, Stroud later became the star of Roger Corman's Bloody Mama and Von Richthofen and Brown (AKA The Red Baron), and of cult classics Live a Little, Steal a Lot, The Buddy Holly Story, and The Amityville Horror, as well as scads of special appearances on an amazing lineup of TV shows (including McMillan and Wife, Adam-12, Ironside, The FBI, Gunsmoke, Police Woman, Hawaii-Five-O, Charlie's Angels, CHIPs, Knots Landing, Fantasy Island, The A-Team, McGuyver, and Babylon 5). In Coogan's Bluff, he invests his slimy character with a strangely appealing blend of malice and hippy-dippyness (some of which date the movie considerably). I have to note here that my mother, Lynn--an avid drive-in movie buff--has always had a thing for Stroud, who sported blond-haired good looks while also delivering wild-eyed villainous performances (which typecast him throughout his career). I've always thought her love for Stroud was strange, but, hey, there it is!

I conclude my examination of the deceptively low-key Coogan's Bluff by mentioning its jazzy score by Lalo Schifrin (Bullitt, Mission Impossible, Dirty Harry, Cool Hand Luke, and many TV show themes), some of which comes into play during a scene set at a wild-assed 1968 NYC hippy club humorously deemed "The Pigeon-Toed Orange Peel." If someone was smart, they'd open a club with that incredible moniker. (Actually, I now think there is one located in Dublin, Ireland, but where is its NYC counterpart?)
Coogan's Bluff may not be a must-see, as must-sees go. But it's a movie you will not, I guarantee you, mind seeing at all, my friend.

Film #18: The Beguiled

In 1971, Clint Eastwood was dangerously, fabulously nearing superstardom. He'd long since completed the "Man With No Name" trilogy--A Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More, and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly--with Italian director Sergio Leone. But he hadn't yet gone supernova with his role as the unorthodox San Francisco cop "Dirty" Harry Callahan. That's probably why he and his other directorial mentor, Don Siegel, felt comfortable enough to produce The Beguiled. It stands, after Two Mules for Sister Sara and Coogan's Bluff, as the actor/director team's third, and strangest, collaboration.

Based on the novel by Thomas Cullinan and packed with gothic atmosphere, The Beguiled is, simultaneously, a moralistic Civil War-era fable, a horror picture, and a devious black comedy (actually, this unclassifiable quality, coupled with what Eastwood biographer Richard Schickel called its "broadly misanthropic" tone, contributed to it being one of Clint's few financial flops). In it, Eastwood plays John McBurney, a wounded Union soldier who escapes the battlefield and is discovered passed out against a tree by a meek little girl (Pamalyn Ferdin, the distinctively-voiced actress who made her mark in the 1970s as the star of TV's Lassie, Space Academy, and as the voice of Lucy in the animated feature A Boy Named Charlie Brown).

Immediately smitten, she turns out to be one of many Southern young ladies
attending a school run by repressed headmistress Geraldine Page. In fact, as the healing McBurney discovers, it's been a while since any of the school's budding ladies have seen a big, strong man. Naturally, McBurney's trapped convalescence definitely turns a few pretty heads, and he takes full sexual advantage of his position. First, a frail teacher (Elizabeth Hartman) falls for him, then a saucy student (Jo Ann Harris) tempts him with her charms. Even the stern Page finds herself doting on this jerk. McBurney finally reveals himself as the scoundrel he truly is and, as a result, gets that old chestnut about "a woman scorned" vividly taught to him (the film's climax left a black, gooey mark on my young soul).


Filmed on location in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, The Beguiled is spookily shot in diffused, overcast light by first time photographer and later Eastwood regular Bruce Surtees, the son of legendary photographer Robert Surtees (The Graduate, Ben-Hur). But its quality didn't make a dent at the ticket counters; though it was a modest critical success, its downbeat tone failed to lure moviegoers' asses into the seats. Siegel and Eastwood both drew sour criticism from the then-hot feminist quarter for portraying women as vindictive creatures. Siegel, a notorious man's man, came to the film's defense, maintaining that, like males, "women are capable of deceit, larceny, murder, anything. Behind that mask of innocence lurks just as much evil as you'll ever find in members of the Mafia." And, if you think about it, really, that's the ultimate feminist statement!!! Eastwood, too, defended the film, eventually marking it as one of his proudest achievements (he later, in 1992, dedicated his Oscar-winning, female-friendly western Unforgiven to Siegel and Sergio Leone). They would later collaborate on box office hits Dirty Harry and Escape From Alcatraz, but would never again make anything, together or apart, as alien and haunting as The Beguiled.