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Let us assume for a moment that you haven't experimented with the psychotropic mushroom and you're wondering about the so called bad experience and just how something like that might play itself out Well go ahead and pop in a fresh copy of The Beguiled. See, with film you have your clean trips (Solaris and anything else directed by Andrei Tarkovsky), whack trips, i.e. the experience-from-which-you-never-recover (Sweet Movie and El Topo), and you're bad organic trips, a category specifically reserved for a film like The Beguiled which is the sort of content those keen writers at the Times who made all the right decisions with their lives and graduated from the Harvard Department of English refer to as "hallucinogenic in tone." By the third act of this Don Siegel directed movie, you may not exactly observe that your two lead-heavy hands have become shrunken and assume all the characteristics of a burrowing insectivorous mammal, nor will you exactly fall under the suspicion that your spine has achieved the same sinuous shape and knotty texture of a pomaceous fruit baring tree incalculable in age, but you will feel something.
In 1970, when this film was filmed, most Americans were looking for an anodyne for their collective pain, a movie like The Graduate perhaps, a lot of world-endism was going on and, of course you had the nightmare break down of war in Vietnam. What you get with The Beguiled, banal drug metaphors aside, is a screenplay adapted from a novel by a guy who at least for the moment wanted to be known as Grimes Grice, and direction from the director who helped bring about the work and career of Sam Peckinpah. In the Beguiled, Donny Siegel, born in 12, Chicago, Il., less than 45 years after The Great Fire is showing his attempt at grappling with all that contemporary cultural madness of the early 1970's in the form of a classical film artifact. The Beguiled is an incredible film and an outstanding contribution to the cinematographic arts in almost every aspect: the shooting, editing, direction and story are all fantastic, and you're not likely to see anything else like it. Undoubtedly, a sinister film, its effects, as I've said, both dizzying and adulterating; frankly it's hard to believe would ever Universal attached its name to this picture, but you are going to see upon viewing some of the sweet, sweet camera moves, and cinematographer Bruce Surtees exploiting every bit of dark myth you harbor in your head about the American Plantation South, conflating beauty with evil in every location shot. Clint Eastwood, needless to say, has never been like this. Old Clint, he moves at instant from coy to livid, his eyes like two Archimedean spirals in medium close up. The rest of the cast is equally exacting and uncanny.
This Beguiled will never make the AFI 100 in my lifetime, but that doesn't stop me from positing that it's one of the best American synch sound films ever made. While most people catalogue it as a western, to include the folks at The Western Channel, The Beguiled is a problem because you don't really know what it is: A sort of war movie? A drama? Psychological thriller? Maybe the answer to all those emotionally wrought Noir films starring Kirk Douglas? I actually call this piece a horror film because when my old man, who likes to kick back with the cheap, gratuitous violence projected in entertainments like The Wire, saw that high angle medium long shot of Geraldine Page wrapping a tourniquet around Clint's bloody leg, Pa was pretty quick to suggest we watch something else like the Outback Bowl, right before he absconded to another room. My advice: watch this one, and make sure it is on a very large screen, preferably run on that DPL home theater projector you're contemplating. I would put The Beguiled right on order along with that important consumer purchase, turn the overheads out, throw some cinematic light up on the big blank wall, and try not to lose your grip because just like Norman Bates, "We all go a little mad sometimes," even the beguiled.


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