Without the West, Clint Eastwood would never have become the legend of the screen that he is today. The actor not only took importance as a nameless man in the fundamental trilogy of Sergio Leone, he made one of the most popular revisionist westerns with “Unforgiven” in 1992 (which fans believe to be the best film of Eastwood). Throughout his career, he relied on the genre formerly massively popular to increase his profile over and over again. But Eastwood was never going to please everyone, and it seems that with “Two Mules for Sister Sara” from the 1970s, he upset the writer himself who found history in the first place.
Directed by Don Siegel and written by Albert Maltz, “Two Mules for Sister Sara” saw Eastwood play Hogan, a civil war soldier who, after having saved the holder of Shirley Maclaine from Bandits, joins the Mexican rebels as they face the invasive French. The film was based on an original scenario by Budd Boetticher, himself a director of several westerns who wrote the “Sara” script in the mid-1960s and was originally intended to achieve. But after engaging in another project, he sold the scenario. When the version of Siegel’s film has finally arrived, Boetticher referred in an interview of 2001 as an “abortion”. Obviously, the director estimated that his original vision of a love story had been completely compromised, Boetticher expressing the dismay of the way Siegel had realized Maclaine in order to make obvious that she was not, in fact a nun – a revelation which came later in the film, but which was not really present in the original Boetticher treatment.
The man who wrote the original story of “Two Mules for Sister Sara” also had much more to say about the final film, and did not let Siegel take down after attending the first.
Budd Boetticher was ready to hit Don Siegel
Having worked together on “Coogan’s Bluff” in 1968, Clint Eastwood and Don Siegel reintegrated for “Two Mules for Sister Sara” in 1970, which would finally become the second of the five collaborations between the pair. Just a year after the movie was released, the actor/director duo reunited for “the beguiled” and the legendary yet controversial “dirty harry” before cementing their undenisable status as two of the great filmmaking collaborators with “escape from alcatraz” in 1979. Their 1970 Western Might Not Have Been Quite AS Celebrated as that prison drama, but it receives a decent critical response and made a modest profit, Bringing in Around $ 5 million On a budget of $ 2.5 million.
A man who certainly did not give the film a positive criticism, however, was Budd Boetticher, who made Siegel known to Siegel in Siegel. In an interview of 1999 (via the senses of cinema), the director told Andrew Rausch that he thought that the West was “horrible”, adding that even if Don Siegel was “a dear friend dear”, he could not hide his feelings about the film. Boetticher remembers attending the premiere at the Theater Pantes in Los Angeles. “I was sitting with Ron Ely, the actor. And Clint, who is now a very dear friend … When we saw this photo, I said:” The stupidest sob in the theater was the main man. Couldn’t he feel his breath? “” Obviously, Boetticher felt the characterization of Sara. According to the director, at one point, Ely suggested that he and Boetticher “get up and hit these two guys behind us”, to what Boetticher replied: “You hit Clint, and I’m going to hit Don.”
Budd Boetticher castigated Don Siegel for two mules for sister Sara
Budd Boetticher was certainly not the first writer of a film Clint Eastwood / Don Siegel who hated the way his original script was translated on the screen. John Milius, the writer behind the 1973 “Dirty Harry” suite “, Magnum Force”, found the unpleasant final product, arguing that the director and Eastwood had completely upset the characterization of Harry Callahan and changed the original end beyond recognition.
But while Milius seemed to reserve most of his opprobrium for interviews, Boetticher told Siegel exactly what he thought of “two mules for Sister Sara”. As he said, Siegel called him the day after the first and was welcomed even more criticism. “Don, how could you make a shit piece like that?” Boetticher remembers having said. He continued:
“He said,” It’s a wonderful thing to wake up in the morning and know that there is a check by post. “And there was a dead silence. I said,” You are sure that are. And Don is aging. Now, I have ten or twenty years older than it was, and I would never do that. “
Despite the disgust of boetticher for the film, “Two Mules for Sister Sara” remains one of the most underestimated films in Eastwood, and most of them are chemistry between the main man and Shirley Maclaine. He may not have met the expectations of the original writer, but the version of Siegel’s film certainly worked for most critics, even if it is not necessarily one of the most famous westerns of Eastwood today.
