Two Mules for Sister Sara. 1970. USA. Directed by Don Siegel. Screenplay by Albert Maltz, based on a story by Budd Boetticher. With Clint Eastwood, Shirley MacLaine, Manolo Fábregas, Alberto Morin. DCP. 116 min.
The script originated with Budd Boetticher, who envisioned it as a vehicle for Robert Mitchum and Silvia Pinal, and something of Boetticher’s spare, ironic sensibility survived Albert Maltz’s reworking. The premise remains a comic interrogation of Western heroism rather than a celebration of it. Clint Eastwood’s American mercenary, hired by Mexican juaristas to blow up a French garrison, falls in with a nun (Shirley MacLaine), who turns out to be less than she appears. Don Siegel, between Coogan’s Bluff and Dirty Harry, maintains the dry tone that made his collaborations with Eastwood productive: the action is efficient, the sentiment withheld until it can do maximum work.
The film’s signal asset is Gabriel Figueroa’s cinematography. Shooting on Mexican locations with a command of harsh noon light and deep shadow that he had developed across 30 years working with Emilio Fernández and John Ford, Figueroa gives the Sonoran landscape a parched specificity that no studio approximation could match. The harsh landscape evokes the Spanish desert locations of a spaghetti Western, as does Ennio Morricone’s score, with its braying Mexican corrido themes.