This is an odd buddy comedy/western from 1979 starring Clint Eastwood as his then-usual amoral drifter and Shirley Maclaine as a nun, during the French intervention in Mexico. Don Siegel directs from a script by Albert Maltz & Budd Boetticher, so you know it's going to get violent.
The movie doesn't work in a lot of ways - for a start Maclaine doesn't make a very convincing Mexican (her role was intended for Elizabeth Taylor) - but it's an interesting oddity. The mismatched stars have surprising chemistry, Gabriel Figueroa's photography is gorgeous, and Siegel provides an ultra-violent ending worthy of Peckinpah.
The appearance of actual Mexicans in the main cast puts this movie well above Joe Kidd's casting of gringo John Saxon as a taco-eater. There are some great scenes of what was pretty extreme gore for a big-budget movie in those days.
Eastwood was in the middle of trying to change his image - this was made between Paint Your Wagon and The Beguiled - and his character is actually fallible for a change. He's grievously wounded at one point, putting him out of action, and his character is endearingly stupid and even naive. Not quite as stupid and naive as his character in The Gauntlet, but certainly not the near-invincible Machiavellian mastermind of the Dollars trilogy and High Plains Drifter.
Maclaine, though clearly miscast, is actually pretty good as the nun (who the audience quickly realises isn't really a nun, though Eastwood doesn't cotton to this). I'm not really a fan though, which highlights a problem with the movie: fans of Clint Eastwood and Shirley Maclaine are probably mutually exclusive groups.
PETA members will be unimpressed by the scene where Eastwood beheads a (real) rattlesnake and hands off its still-squirming corpse to Maclaine. The opening scene of Eastwood's horse stamping on a (real) tarantula might upset them too. The more old westerns I watch the less extreme the animal slaughter in Cannibal Holocaust seems, but at least they don't cut any monkeys' faces off in Two Mules.
Posted by pearce at August 29, 2007 8:59 AMMuch as I tremble at the thought of doubting your movie knowledge, but "Two Mules" is from 1970, not 1979. 8)
It's an interesting movie for the role it played in director Don Siegel's career too, as part of his ongoing partnership with Eastwood. The movement towards the gritty amoral character of "Dirty" Harry Callaghan is signposted in the character beats of Hogan. "Two Mules" is very much a transitional film, from the sheen and shine of the 60s to the grit and grime of the 70s; for the actor, director and, I guess, for the Western genre too.
Posted by: Scott A at August 30, 2007 1:49 PM