Two Mules for Sister Sara
Don Siegel, Mexico, USA, 1970o
During the French occupation of Mexico in the 1860s, the American mercenary Hogan rescues a nun from being raped by bandits and more or less unwittingly becomes her companion and protector. During their adventures together, Sister Sara proves to be amazingly capable of living. Most importantly, the mismatched pair discovers that their combined knowledge and tricks could be used to attack a French fort, which they both want to destroy fro different reasons.
Clint Eastwood had just become an international star as a poncho-bearing mercenary in Sergio Leone's so-called Dollar Trilogy when Western routinier Budd Boetticher and Communist screenwriter Albert Maltz, who had been on the Hollywood blacklist from 1948 to 1969 but had nevertheless worked extensively under pseudonyms, came up with this wonderful first comedy version of the Eastwood character. As a gunslinger in the pay of Mexican patriots against French invaders, Eastwood gives the usual stoic quibbler, but Shirley McLaine so shrewdly and persistently stands up to him as a supposed nun that the image of the Lonesome Rider is subjected to a first comic general revision. The film was directed by the crime and western buff Don Siegel, who transferred the vigilante practices of the frontier hero to the crime world a few years later with the Dirty Harry films.
Andreas FurlerGalleryo
