The Beguiled
| The Beguiled | |
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| Directed by | Don Siegel |
| Produced by | Don Siegel |
| Screenplay by |
Albert Maltz Irene Kamp |
| Based on |
A Painted Devil by Thomas P. Cullinan |
| Starring |
Clint Eastwood Geraldine Page Elizabeth Hartman Jo Ann Harris |
| Music by | Lalo Schifrin |
| Cinematography | Bruce Surtees |
| Edited by | Carl Pingitore |
| Distributed by | Universal Pictures |
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Release date
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Running time
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105 min. |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
The Beguiled is a 1971 American drama film directed by Don Siegel, starring Clint Eastwood and Geraldine Page. The script was written by Albert Maltz and is based on the 1966 Southern Gothic novel written by Thomas P. Cullinan, originally titled A Painted Devil. The film marks the third of five collaborations between Siegel and Eastwood, following Coogan's Bluff (1968) and Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), and continuing with Dirty Harry (1971) and Escape from Alcatraz (1979).
During the middle of the American Civil War in 1863, injured Union soldier John McBurney is rescued from the verge of death by twelve-year-old Amy, a student at an all-girl boarding school in rural Mississippi, the Miss Martha Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies. The eponymous headmistress reluctantly agrees to take him in until he has built up his health, under the condition that he is locked in the music room and kept under watch. Edwina, the schoolteacher, takes an immediate liking to John, as does Carol, a teenage student.
John begins to bond with each of the women in the house, including the live-in servant, Hallie. As he charms each of the women, the sexually-repressed atmosphere of the school becomes filled with jealousy and deceit, and the women begin to turn on one another. After Carol witnesses John kissing Edwina in the garden, she ties a blue rag to the school's entrance gate to alert the Confederacy of a Yankee soldier. When a band of Confederate soldiers pass by the school and go to investigate, Martha lies and convinces them John is part of the Confederacy.
Martha also becomes secretly infatuated with John, and it is revealed through flashback that she had had an incestuous relationship with her deceased brother when he lived in the house. Martha considers keeping John at the school as a handyman, and later makes sexual advances toward him, which he declines.
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