Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
Offbeat Civil War drama in which a wounded Yankee soldier, after finding refuge in an isolated girls' school in the South towards the end of the war, becomes the object of the young women's sexual fantasies. The soldier manipulates the situation for his own gratification, but when he refuses to completely comply with the girls' wishes, they make it very difficult for him to leave.
Don Siegel's psychosexual Civil War thriller is a genuinely singular film — a Gothic chamber piece drenched in repression, manipulation, and dark irony. The plot is richly layered, using the isolated girls' school as a pressure cooker where gender power dynamics invert in unsettling ways. Eastwood plays against his macho type to compelling effect, and Geraldine Page delivers a memorably complex, yearning performance. The film's atmosphere is distinctive — moss-draped, languid, and menacing — though the cinematography, while effective, doesn't quite reach the level of its other strengths. The ending is darkly satisfying in concept but lands with slightly less force than the sustained tension preceding it deserves. Its Southern Gothic conception remains one-of-a-kind in Siegel's canon and in the broader Civil War genre.