Two Mules for Sister Sara

My grandmother from Nebraska had just returned from a trip to what she called "old Mexico."  At that time, she owned a big RV and, with a caravan of other retirees, she and her husband drove the rig down to Mexico City.  This was in 1968 or 1969.  A few years later, she came to visit her daughter (my mother) in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.  The huge white RV was parked outside the house on the roadside.  My grandmother and her husband drank "high balls" in the late afternoon.  She regaled us with tales of her adventures in "old Mexico" with the RV caravan.  In Mexico City, she had heard rumors of the government crack-down on protesters and that there had been some kind of massacre.  My grandmother approved of law and order and didn't think that the massacre was necessarily a bad thing.  In fact, she implied that a little of that kind of law and order in the USA might be beneficial.  One night during her visit, a Clint Eastwood movie called Two Mules for Sister Sara was on TV.  I recall watching the movie with my Nebraska grandmother and her second husband in the living room.  She remarked on the beautiful landscapes featured in the movie and said that the people in Mexico were very warm and friendly.  I was probably about 14 and thought the movie was fabulous.  Whenever I recall my grandmother, now long dead, I think about her trip to Mexico in the giant gas-guzzling RV and Two Mules for Sister Sara.  What I recall about the movie is what a 14-year old boy would remember:  the nun turned out to be a prostitute and there was a spectacular battle at the end of the movie, not a gunfight but a real all-out combat sequence.  

The movie has been showing in rotation on STARZ and so I decided to take a look at the 1970 Western.  The movie is handsomely produced and efficiently directed by Don Siegel -- he would later make Clint Eastwood even more famous in his Dirty Harry, acclaimed (sort of ) by Pauline Kael as a "Fascist masterpiece."  Shirley MacLaine plays the prostitute disguised as a nun.  The movie is beautifully shot by the great Mexican D. P. Gabriel Figueroa.  The movie has a startling score by Ennio Morricone.  The musical theme associated with Eastwood's mercenary "Mr. Hogan" as the nun calls him is a trotting tune that simulates the gait of a horse over which we hear a syncopated braying sound -- the mule crying out "hee-haw" over and over again:  the tune is up-tempo, sizzles with percussion, and has synthesizer ornamentation; Sister Sara gets a sweet-sounding ecclesiastical chant sung by high women's voices, an aerial sort of cantus that suggests a choir of angels.  The film's principal appeal for me today resides in its wonderful footage of Tlaycapan, most particularly the enormous and ancient mission churches in the province of Morelos, huge masonry walls and big bell-towers overlooking desert and bosque with craggy volcanic formations scattered around the landscape.  

Unfortunately, the movie is pretty routine.  It's not dull -- in fact, the film follows the pattern of "one damned thing" after another.  It's action-packed but on reflection the plot doesn't make sense.  Budd Boettcher, an accomplished Western director himself wrote the story.  But the screenwriter, Albert Maltz, apparently, vandalized Boettcher;s concept -- in his scenario, the woman was not a nun but an aristocratic Mexican woman (who turns out to be prostitute); this would have been more plausible than what we see on-screen.  Shirley MacLaine, who is about as White as you can get, is charming as the nun, but the notion that she is a holy sister isn't plausible from the outset and, therefore, much of her behavior seems arbitrary and makes no sense.  (The film was originally planned to star Eastwood and a Mexican actress -- it's a co-production with a Mexican film studio, but the bosses thought the picture would be more "bankable" with MacLaine and, in fact, she gets top billing -- something that seems to have irritated Eastwood.)  The production was vexed by all sorts of problems including serious cases of Montezuma's Revenge that prolonged the shooting schedule.  Boettcher bullied Siegel about the changes to his story and Siegel supposedly said:  "Every morning I'm happy about this film because I know the check is in the mail"; Boettcher, who lived in Mexico, said: "Every morning I'm happy because I can look myself in the mirror without being ashamed."  

So what's it all about?  Hogan is a deadly loner of the kind Eastwood perfected in his spaghetti Westerns.  Here he's a venal mercenary who has been retained by Juaristas, rebels who are fighting the French soldiers serving under Maximilian.  Sister Sara is a prostitute working undercover in the disguise of a nun, enlisted in the guerilla war on the Juarista side.  Hogan rescues her from rape by three nasty gringos (whom he speedily guns down).  Then, there are various adventures involving pursuing French cavalry and a rattlesnake.  After some erotic byplay between the two leads -- they obviously desire one another but can't act on their inclinations -- Hogan gets shot with an arrow through the shoulder by some Yaqui Indians.  (Sister Sara drives them off with her big shiny crucifix.)  The closest thing to sex in the movie, until an obligatory last minute scene, is a very prolonged episode in which Sister Sara extracts the arrow from Hogan's shoulder --a gory scene involving lots of penetration, cauterization with gunpowder, and the use of booze as an anesthetic; it's obviously a highly perverse surrogate for sex and prolonged voluptuously.  After this sequence, the film sets up the big battle at its climax involving hundreds of guerillas equally matched with battalions of French troops.  Siegel is influenced by Peckinpah and the Italians like Corbucci and Leone -- the big battle is very bloody with lots of fiery deaths, some of them involving long drops off Mission tower parapets, arms getting hacked off and machetes splitting skulls. The battle is tricked-out with lots of dynamite hurled like a baseball, a pinata full of explosives, and elaborate sequences of hand-to-hand combat.  It's fairly exciting but the outcome is a foregone conclusion and, in fact, the pyrotechnics go on for too long.  Aspects of the film can't be explained.  After the three rapists are killed, Sister Sara buries them in graves constructed of elaborate mounds of rock.  This work would take about three days and would be a brutal endeavor under the Mexican sun.  In the movie, the nun buries the bad hombres while Eastwood eats a platter of beans left by the dead gringos.  There's no reason that Sister Sara would bury these guys and, if she's just trying to establish her bona fides as a nun, this seems like the worst possible way to demonstrate her religious credibility.  In any event, burying the bad guys would be illogical even if she were a nun, but, of course, she's just a prostitute in disguise.  The final sex scene is embarrassing.  Shirley MacLaine is taking one of those peek-a-boo bubble baths featured in Westerns that conceal all the interesting bits.  Eastwood, lusting to see her, uses the strongbox captured in the battle to batter down the door -- another curious substitute for sex.  Then, he hops in the bath with her in his full Western regalia, boots, chaps, vest and all -- somehow, the clothing gets disarranged and, after Sister Sara coyly asks Hogan to remove his hat, Eastwood apparently penetrates her (how? he's fully dressed).  She whoops enthusiastically.