Movies - The Beguiled

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	Movies - The Beguiled

The Beguiled is a 1971 film directed by Don Siegel. It was based on the 1966 Southern Gothic novel written by Thomas Cullinan, originally titled A Painted Devil, and the script was written by Albert Maltz. During the American civil war, injured Yankee soldier John McBurney (played by Clint Eastwood) is rescued on the verge of death by a teenage girl from an all-girl boarding school in Louisiana. At first the all-female staff and pupils are scared, but as he starts to recover, one by one he charms them and the sexually repressed atmosphere becomes filled with jealousy and deceit.

SPOILER ALERT After rejecting the headmistress for a younger girl, McBurney gets his comeuppance in the form of some painful Freudian symbolism — his infected leg is amputated. When he reforms and announces his intention to marry one of the teachers, it is too late though. He has alienated the youngest girl, the one who first found him, by killing her pet turtle after throwing it aside in anger. She picks the mushrooms that the headmistress and girls poison him with.

Made right before Dirty Harry, this was a bold early attempt by Eastwood to play against type. It was not a hit, but then the Warner Bros. weren't sure how to handle it and wound up marketing it as a hothouse melodrama: “One man...seven women...in a strange house!" "His love... or his life..."

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