Abstinence on the Trail

By JAY COCKS

Shirley MacLaine's screen career careens from pillow to lamppost. She specializes in playing lovable, indomitable whores (Some Came Running, Irma La Douce, Sweet Charity), a role she sashays through once again in Two Mules for Sister Sara. In this one, Shirley is supposed to be a nun but the fact that she is a hooker in disguise comes as more of a surprise to Co-Star Clint Eastwood than it does to the audience.

Eastwood is an 1865 soldier of fortune who pauses on his way through Mexico to help a nun escape the clutches of some typically greasy and grinning desperadoes. The nun tags along with the adventurer, and her presence causes him considerable discomfort. He ogles her across the campfire every night and takes heavy pulls on his bottle of whisky to still his mighty but unrighteous lust. Screenwriter Albert Maltz would probably call this comic irony. After too many of these interludes, Eastwood delivers dynamite to some rebels and joins them in an attack on a fortress, during which the nun reveals herself as a true camp follower ("Well, I'll be a . . ."). MacLaine quickly shucks her habit, and Eastwood, after vanquishing the enemy, joins her in a hot tub, longing to make up for those nights of abstinence on the trail.

Director Don Siegel has made some good, lean, tough films in his time (Riot in Cell Block 11, Madigan, Coogan's Bluff), and the violence in Two Mules for Sister Sara is typically visceral. Siegel's talents, however, are weighed down by a heavy script and unwieldy performances by the two stars. Eastwood looks grizzled, stares into the sun and sneers, but anything more demanding seems beyond his grasp. Shirley MacLaine, on the other hand, has considerable range and some charm, both of which have been pretty well blunted by the monotonous consistency of her roles. Things do not bode well for the future either. Next year she will be making a television series for the 1971-72 season, which is like going from confinement to prison.

. Jay Cocks

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