fans believe is Eastwood’s best film). Throughout his career, he has relied on the once massively popular genre to boost his profile again and again. But Eastwood was never going to please everybody, and it seems with 1970’s “Two Mules for Sister Sara,” he upset the very writer who’d come up with the story in the first place.
Directed by Don Siegel and written by Albert Maltz, “Two Mules for Sister Sara” saw Eastwood play Hogan, a Civil War soldier who, after rescuing Shirley MacLaine’s titular nun from bandits, joins Mexican rebels as they take on the invading French. The film was based on an original screenplay by Budd Boetticher, himself a director of multiple Westerns who wrote the “Sara” script in the mid-’60s and originally had the intention to direct. But after he became committed to another project, he sold the screenplay. When Siegel’s version of the movie finally arrived, Boetticher referred to it in a 2001 interview as an “abortion.” Evidently, the director felt his original vision of a love story had been utterly compromised, with Boetticher expressing dismay at the way in which Siegel had directed MacLaine so as to make it obvious that she was not, in fact a nun — a revelation that came later in the film, but which wasn’t actually present in Boetticher’s original treatment.
The man who wrote the original story for “Two Mules for Sister Sara” had a lot more to say about the final film, too, and didn’t let Siegel off the hook after attending the premiere.
