They Don’t Make Trailers Like That Anymore: THE BEGUILED (1971 and 2017)

While the purpose of my journey through the history of movie trailers is to treat them as artistic artifacts, you cannot escape the fact that these are, at their core, commercials.  They are artifacts designed to entice you into coming to see the wares they are presenting.  And sometimes in fulfilling their function, trailers misrepresent the truth.  Sometimes they alter events to make it seem like a different kind of picture, and sometimes they outright lie.

Which brings us to The Beguilded, which is a personal favorite film of mine starring Clint Eastwood.  It’s a Southern psycho-sexual gothic in which the power dynamic changes over and over again.  It’s very low on action and very high on mood, creepiness and twisted set pieces.  It’s one of the examples of the kind of filmmaking that was done before the Dawn of The Blockbuster; the only way this film could have been remade was by an independent studio with an idiosyncratic director at the helm, and yet in 1971 it was a major release.

(Warning--In discussing these trailers, spoilers can be inferred...)

To sell it, Universal gave us this trailer, which seems to mostly...try to sell us on the male fantasy of a guy alone in a house full of horny women.  After the opening scene and some clips establishing the circumstances, we’re kinda assailed for a bit with Clint admiring, being admired by, and wooing various women and girls.  The narrator really tries to sell the idea of the scenario and the implied sexy times before we get some action at the one and a half minute mark--and it’s about all the action in the film--and a hint that this is a much darker film than we’ve been sold up to this point.

It’s only fair, since I brought it up, that I present the trailer for Sofia Coppola’s remake.  Because this version was produced for an arthouse crowd, the trailer takes on a more narrative form, giving us a condensed version of the film’s first act or so. 

And then it presents us a glimpse of Coppola’s version of the ending....followed by material I suspect is from the crescendo of the 2nd Act.

...making it seem like a different sort of movie.  And that’s just not right.  While I appreciate that the tonality of the trailer makes it clear this is a dark film and not a Sexy Romp, changing around the incidents in this way to make it seem more a conventional thriller than what it really is.

In both cases, these trailers lie to get us into the theater.  As much as I love the 1971 version, I imagine there were a lot of pissed off moviegoers who walked out when they realized what a twisted, psychologically messed-up piece of work it actually was.

Trailers courtesy of Movie Classic Clips