After nearly two decades in front of the camera, the born-grizzled Clint Eastwood made his first directorial outing with the stalker thriller Play Misty for Me in 1971. The movie is simultaneously an originary text for several of the habits and patterns that would crop up in the modest yet soulful filmmaker’s ensuing 45-plus features and also a simplistic beginning to a much more sophisticated career. Play Misty for Me functions as both evidence for haters’ arguments against Eastwood and proof that in some ways he always had the juice as an artist.
Clint himself stars as David, a radio DJ spinning jazz and R&B records at a sleepy station in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California (the director’s longtime real life home). David’s oh-so-terrible burden is that he’s a womanizer who just can’t help himself, and his appetite has driven away the affection of Tobie (Donna Mills), a former girlfriend whom he chastises for the temptations presented by her supposedly revolving door of roommates. One night, after his wee hours broadcast, he crosses paths with Evelyn (Jessica Walter), who he comes to realize has been regularly requesting he play Erroll Garner’s “Misty.” He lets her into his life as a casual fuck buddy, which turns out to be a mistake as this otherwise totally anonymous woman becomes consumed with obsession, crossing every boundary imaginable, much to David’s classically Eastwoodian gruff exasperation. As David works toward rebuilding things with Tobie, Evelyn does everything in her power to make his life miserable.
It’s a pity that Play Misty for Me boasts little of the moral complications that secretly underlie subsequent Eastwood films, from Bronco Billy to Hereafter. In the film’s conception, David is suave and beloved by his community, Tobie is a bland nice girl and Evelyn an unstable psychopath. Eastwood and writers Jo Heims and Dean Riesner stop just short of characterizing David as a complete saint, but there aren’t the gratifyingly contradictory layers to his role here that would come in Unforgiven and Gran Torino. I suppose you could say David and Play Misty are still part of the first or second wave of archetypal personas that those later films and characters are building on and deconstructing, but he’s still an especially thin and un-engaging center of gravity for a movie to orbit. This is to say nothing of the fact that the two principal women in the movie are utilized as such stark contrasts and opposing forces that it begins to feel pretty misogynistic.
As an aesthetic object, you could do worse than Play Misty for Me in the Eastwood oeuvre. Fit king is not exactly one of the filmmaker’s claims to fame, but David is exceedingly well-dressed, befitted in a number of wonderful ensembles — a floral button-up shirt and pinstripe pants; a snakeskin shirt, unbuttoned all the way; huge collars; terrific sideburns. The orange squiggly earrings that dangle off the lobes of his housekeeper, Birdie (Clarice Taylor) are also a treat. And the protagonist’s home is situated right on the cliffs by the ocean, with an entrance whose trail of rocks requires some acrobatics and whose design seems to bleed into the trees and overgrowth. It’s fantastic to spend time there.
There’s an unmistakable California cool that emanates off the whole ordeal; early on, in one of his shows, David prepares the audience for “five hours of mellow groove,” and the film essentially follows suit. This is billed as a thriller but it’s more accurately a blasé hangout movie and neutered romance. While years later, Fatal Attraction takes a similar plot and isn’t much less reductive about the Glenn Close character’s wellbeing or personhood, at least it had the decency to be taut and suspenseful. At some of its most critical dramatic junctures, Play Misty for Me shifts its focus to wan, tedious sequences of David and Tobie smooching in various seaside locations, in one truly confounding shot even evoking Adam and Eve.
Play Misty’s third act detour to the Monterey Jazz Festival is cool in theory and an argument for Eastwood’s eclectic interests and willingness to swerve in focus and form, briefly evolving into documentary. The movie’s intentionality about music is pronounced from its opening moments, which don’t feature any musical accompaniment, presaging a similar choice in American Sniper decades later. We watch David mill about his property for a little while until he hops in his convertible and inserts a cassette tape. It’s an announcement of authorial control that proves unstable and inconsistent throughout the rest of Misty — but it’s still palpable.
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