Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970)

There is a moment in Don Siegel's 1970 Western when Clint Eastwood's mercenary, a man named Hogan, discovers that the nun he has been escorting across the Mexican plains is not a nun at all but a pistol-toting Juarista prostitute. The film treats this as a punchline, and it mostly works. Set during the French intervention in Mexico, the picture moves with the efficient, sardonic gait of a director who knew exactly what he was selling. Shirley MacLaine plays a character written as Mexican. She is not Mexican. The supporting cast is thick with Mexican performers, and the production shot on location near Tlayacapan, which earns the film a sliver of credit and then quietly forfeits it at the top of the call sheet.

Sister Sara proves genuinely capable. She climbs a trestle to set charges when Hogan's shoulder is too damaged to manage it. She solicits funds from villagers and brothel workers with equal ease. She has shot a French lieutenant and would do it again. And yet the camera belongs to Hogan, the plot resolves into a romantic pairing, and her competence is arranged around his arc like furniture in a rented room. The film has no interest in what she wants beyond the man standing in front of her.

The economics are mercenary in the literal sense. Hogan aids the revolution for half the garrison's treasury, which is the opposite of a critique of capital. There is no environmental conscience here, no meditation on the body, no neurodivergent interiority, no attempt to revise the historical record. The French are villains because the plot requires villains. Nothing is preached. Siegel reportedly told Budd Boetticher that it felt good to wake up knowing a check was in the mail, and that spirit animates every frame. A modest, well-oiled entertainment, and no more.