The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, April 5-11
The Beguiled (1971)
Directed by Don Siegel
Siegel’s acidic pastoral is a candidate for the hard-bitten journeyman auteur’s finest film, though it’s got stiff competition. Here the working-class poet of the law and lawbreaker turns his gaze on an all-girl’s boarding school beset by a lothario intruder (Clint Eastwood). His broken leg is the tool that helps him seduce each of them in kind, promising freedom, sex, conversation, adventure, fatherly companionship and more sex. Siegel’s tough direction softens ever so slightly in this distaff revenge-in-progress, finding overwhelming, disarming humanity in the faces of the betrayed, and there’s a rough one every twenty-five minutes or so. The Beguiled‘s female avengers may have kept the film from the Western canon, but make no mistake this has all the fire and fury of John Ford, Nicholas Ray, Budd Boetticher and Andre De Toth wrapped in one bandaged leg, as Eastwood’s character pays for the rampant bedding and beating the Man with No Name doled out to women in his own films as director. Scout Tafoya (April 9, 2:15pm at Metrograph’s “Universal in the 70s: Part Two”)