Two Mules For Sister Sara

To make up for six days without a review (though to be fair I have been busy to some extent), here's your second review of the day. I did rewatch Full Metal Jacket in the past week, but I was tired of reviewing Kubrick films and decided to give that one a pass for now, and I found Glengarry Glen Ross of little interest, a completely uncinematic and dull film that defines "filmed play". So after posting my review of Vera Cruz earlier today, here's my commentary on Don Siegel's Two Mules For Sister Sara (1970), also set during the French occupation of Mexico, but despite the best efforts of super-cool Clint Eastwood and a surprisingly attractive Shirley Maclaine, it's not nearly as good as the former.

Hogan (Clint Eastwood) is an American gun-for-hire who rescues the attractive Sister Sara (Shirley Maclaine) from being raped by a gang of thugs in the middle of the Mexican desert. After some snappy dialogue and some close brushes with French troops and rattlesnakes, the two fall in together, finding out that each is working for the Juarista - Hogan for money, Sara for devotion to a righteous cause. They team up to help Juarista Colonel Beltran (Manuel Fabregas) destroy the French garrison in Chihuahua, where Sara worked - only Hogan finds out that Sara isn't actually a nun at all (as if that needed explaining).

Like a great many of Clint Eastwood's immediate post-Sergio Leone films (Hang 'Em High, High Plains Drifter), Sister Sara does its best to ape Leone's films in style and appearance, with Clint playing yet another Man With No Name clone. Reportedly co-writer Budd Boetticher (the director of such cult "adult Westerns" as The Tall T and Buchannan Rides Alone) was rather pissed off that the producers turned his original story into a "typical Clint Eastwood thing", and there's no small degree of truth to that. While Don Sigel made some great films through his career, several with Eastwood (Dirty Harry, Coogan's Bluff), Sister Sara is far from his finest hour, yet another early '70s Leone-lite Western that doesn't come close to the style and artistry of the films it tries to emulate.

The film starts out strongly with an iconic Eastwood intro; with a sleazy thug holding the half-naked Maclaine at gun-point, Clint coolly tosses a dynamite stick their way. The early scenes of Hogan and Sara together are wonderful, aided in no small part by the witty screenplay; the scene where Sara tries to remove an arrow lodged in the drunk Hogan's shoulder is a particular high-point. But about half-way through, as the film's main plot and side characters are introduced, the movie slows to a dead crawl and never really picks up again. The supporting cast is straight from central casting: the Juaristas are virtuous and heroic, the French decadent fascist slobs, and there are some poor helpless peasants in between, crying and staring at the atrocities from the edge of the frame. All of this has been done before and elsewhere, and better; when Hogan's only interest is mercenary, it's hard to care about the shallow ciphers he's helping, however noble and heroic they may be. Before long, we just wish that the interminable scenes of French atrocity and Juarista planning were replaced with more scenes of our two leads duking it out.

Sigel's direction, despite some nice photography by Gabriel Figueroa, is generally rather flat and un-inspired. Sigel can't really pick up the pace in the middle sections, and even the final battle is rather underwhelming given all the build-up (having, as in Vera Cruz, all the usual gimmicks, with repeating rifles, dynamite and Gatling guns in prominent use). While the outdoor scenes are beautiful and well-shot, the sets in the later segments are quite obviously sets. The strongest point of the film is undoubtedly the witty, well-written script by Boetticher and Albert Maltz. Ennio Morricone contributes a rather blah score that sounds like he just tweaked a few of his Dollars trilogy themes and called it a day.

Clint Eastwood is at his bad-ass best, playing the gruff, quick-shooting stranger, this time with a sharp tongue and a healthy sexual appetite (though not nearly as crude as the rapist "Stranger" from Clint's next Western, High Plains Drifter). Shirley Maclaine, whom I usually find rather mousy however charming she can be (The Children's Hour, The Apartment), is unusually attractive as the title character, and has a lot of fun as the whore in nun's clothing, whose occasional drinks and lapses into profanity threaten to reveal her true identity. The two leads have great chemistry and work wonderfully together. The rest of the cast is non-descript, playing as mentioned above rather broadly drawn caricatures; whenever the camera isn't on our two protagonists it drags, and that's much of the second half.

Two Mules For Sister Sara isn't a bad film by any means - if nothing else, it's worth watching for Clint and Shirley, who have a lot of fun with the slight material. But for the most part, I would only recommend it for non-discerning Clint Eastwood and Western fans.

Rating: 6/10 - Use Your Own Discretion