The Beguilded (1971)

The Beguiled, the original film version of Thomas P. Cullinan's 1966 novel A Painted Devil was released in 1971, directed by Don Siegel and starred Clint Eastwood as a wounded Union solder taken in at a private girls finishing school in 1864 Virginia. The film was remade by Sofia Coppola and released last year and comparing the two versions of the story is really quite interesting. Coppola seemed primarily interested in the idea of the handsome young solder (in her version played by Colin Farrell) and the disruption he unleashes on this small world of isolated women, cut off from male contact by the war. Now that is the central theme of both films and no doubt the source material, but Coppola cleaves off a lot of the secondary elements of the story to focus, in some vaguely feminist way, on that central theme. She in effect makes the story cleaner in a lot of ways as well.

In Coppola's version all the slaves have run off, in Siegel's there is still one loyal female slave left, a figure that would complicate the theme of female solidarity that the latter director seeks to emphasize. The headmistress (Geraldine Page in the original and Nicole Kidman in the remake) has a disturbing backstory in the original that sheds her character in an entirely different light from the largely benign version in the remake. You also find out quicker in the original film that the solder is not that good of a guy, though about all you find out of his background is he is from New York, in the remake he is made a recent Irish immigrant and is on the whole a more (but not much more) sympathetic figure then his cinematic predecessor. This is not to speak ill of Coppola's version, I thought both versions were quite good as individual takes on the story, they compliment each other more then they detract from one another, much like the two versions of True Grit. *** for both versions.