In the winter of 1969 Clint Eastwood and Don Siegel started work on the movie, The Beguiled - a masterpiece that is strangely underrated in Eastwood's native US but loved across Europe, particularly France where the movie is held in very high regard. Though in 1970 this must have be seen as being as unlike an Eastwood movie as it was possible to get.
The project came to Eastwood in a roundabout way - Jennings Lang, a reader for Universal, saw in the novel a bold departure for their newest megastar. While the script was being developed Clint was in Europe filming Kelly's Heroes.
"One of the basic motifs in The Beguiled is the female desire to castrate the male." Don Siegel.
Filming eventually started in April 1970 and it opened a year later in only a handful of screens. The studio didn't understand the film and fearing a flop they treated it badly. This resulted in the film not initially earning a profit and grossing only $1 million.
Clint had his own ideas of why the film failed.
"I guess people don't want to see me play a loser. Dustin Hoffman and AL Pacino play losers very well," Clint told an interviewer at the time. "My audience likes to see me a winner."
Nevertheless over the years The Beguiled has taken its rightful place among cinema classics - it's not really a western but a civil war sex drama. And it truly is an amazing piece of cinema.
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