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- Unknown
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- A Painted Devil
- needed to precede following dl
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- 100 minutes (Uncut)
- Review Format:
- DVD
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- 1970
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- Predominant Genre:
- Drama
- Director:
Director 
Donald Siegel- :
Outstanding Performances Entire cast 
- Premiss:
- While convalescing in a girls’ boarding school, an injured soldier cons his way into each of the lonely women’s hearts; causing them to turn on each other.
- Themes:
- Aggression | Alienation | Capitalism | Christianity | Coming-of-age | Corporate Power | Courage | Curative | Curiosity | Destiny | Emotional repression | Erotophobia | Grieving | Guilt | Gynophobia | Loneliness | Narcissism | Nostalgia | Parasitism | Passivity | Personal | Political | Republicanism | Sadomasochism | Schizophrenia | Sex | Sexism | Sexual Repression | Solipsism | Stereotyping | Terrorism | Totalitarianism | The West | White culture | White people | White supremacy
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The most interesting of the five collaborations between star Clint EASTWOOD and director Don Siegel; with EASTWOOD playing-against-type as an emasculated loser.
Vanity project
EASTWOOD plays an unlikable White soldier surrounded by emotionally-repressed White women whose outwardly-civilized personae are twisted by recurrent bouts of a humanity they can never fully repress.
Inevitably, such futile attempts at suppressing human nature lead to a classic Southern Gothic‑type scenario in which the desire for death is compounded by sensual longings, sexual jealousies & rampant invidiousness. It would have been difficult to make this film work if it were not for the physical attractiveness of the leading actor (his limited acting ability does not detract from this); making EASTWOOD’s good looks a basic theme of the melodrama.
What makes this movie so interesting is how much it reveals about the misogyny and gynophobia of its makers. White women are presented as being quintessential castraters whose only goal is to tame men, sexually, in lieu of being able to trust them – sexually. White men are shown as inherently-unreliable and sexually-rapacious; White women, as unfulfilled by a culture that denies them the very fulfillment they demand revenge for, yet choose to do nothing positive nor pratical about.
That such twisted psyches could only exist in a repressive culture like that possessed by Whites is dramatically-evaded by never comparing White sexuality with any other ethnicity - despite the presence of a Black slave who is clearly somewhat more emotionally-mature and somewhat less love-starved than the White characters. However, the latter character functions not so much as a dramatic contrast to the Whites, but more as another example of historical White violence.
Sex, Violence & Vindictiveness
Whites associate sex with violence because they spend so much time trying to violently-suppress their sexual feelings which then violently return to haunt White nightmares. This desire to try and rise above their own natures in order to justify the White belief that they are superior to other ethnicities, makes women want to avenge themselves on men before they have betrayed any exclusive sexual love, rather than after by trying to make sure men are sexually-controlled enough to take-on the responsibilities of meaningful personal relationships.
But, introducing politics into the bedroom, in this way, only makes such relationships and such responsibilities ever harder to find. Whites are little more than the slaves of their sexual obsessions, because they possess a culturally-dictated compulsion to want it that way; leading them to lash out in invidious rage at anyone not so self-frustrated.
The White actresses portray their roles so phenomenally-well that they actually seem to become a single woman with multiple facets: The guilt‑ridden White woman who refuses to enjoy sex for its own sake without the guilt-reducing solace of an exclusive love – but this is a love they cannot really feel because it is allegedly-tainted with sexual lust. The characterizations are subtle and to-the-point.
White supremacy
White women are told that if they enjoy sex they are bad; if they do not, they are castrating. To be accepted by other Whites, White women accept that they must allow politics to enter the bedroom such that White men’s sexual expression must be controlled to make them men – when all this really does is make White men frustrated and, thus, far more likely to engage in prostitution, pornography, adultery & concubinage.
The obvious answer to all this sex-frustration is to make friends with people of ethnic groups who are not so sex-obsessed; thereby, learning a better way to fully-experience their true humanity. But this would risk Whites losing the benefits of a White supremacy that equates repression with civilization & Whiteness with racial superiority – the fear of the social ostracism attendant upon thus becoming Nigger-lovers or race-traitors is too great for the White mind to bear with equanimity. It also runs the risk of Whites realizing that those they deem inferior are actually better-off than they are and that the comforting White belief that everyone else is as miserable as Whites are is just that – a self-serving delusion. In this way, endemic White masochism becomes inevitable.
Whites would much rather live as slaves, with the repression, than live as free individuals, without it. The latter requires taking personal responsibility, rather than blaming others for one’s own mistakes; the former means not taking such responsibility, while desperately-seeking scapegoats to compensate for such a poor choice. White culture is thus a gilded cage for Whites within the limits of which happiness is a chimera and vindictiveness the only solace. The never-ending White conflict between human emotions and the masochistic desire for White acceptance leads them to perpetually knock down the walls of their culture without ever really intending to leave the prison, since they then immediately rebuild them, albeit with a different color-scheme.
The anti-war message of the movie in critiquing the willingness of soldiers to obey orders – no matter how immoral – is drowned-out by the pervasive sexual atmosphere that is most-closely redolent of pornography than a standard Hollywood drama. In this, it is akin to a Robert Aldrich melodrama (eg, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?; Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte; or, The Killing of Sister George). Here, favoring lovemaking over the Christian warmongering that claims God is on our side
can only lead to tragedy when love in such martial cultures is never fully-expressible.
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