Modern horror thrillers often underrate the value of location, existing in generic big cities and small towns that detach us from the reality of their narratives. Detaching us further is the sledgehammer approach that filmmakers often take to telegraphing and delivering scares, which keeps us on guard for an onslaught of genre clichés. By contrast, the thrillers of the 1960s and ’70s used to be gnarlier and more casual, appearing to be set in places outside of sets and backdrops and featuring real human beings. Think of the astonishing sense of place that Sam Peckinpah conjured in Straw Dogs or that Steven Spielberg offered in every film he directed from the early ’70s to the early ’80s. Clint Eastwood’s 1971 directorial debut, Play Misty for Me, hails from a similar tradition, as he has the confidence to mount a vividly atmospheric character study that morphs into something resonantly scary.
Eastwood transports Play Misty for Me from Los Angeles, the original setting of Jo Helms and Dean Reisner’s script, to Monterey, California, more specifically Carmel-by-the-Sea, where the multi-hyphenate has lived since the late ’60s and even served as mayor. His love for the Monterey peninsula is immediately apparent in the film, which opens on a bold aerial view of the rocky cliffs along the coast, with the camera gradually zooming in toward a cabin in a secluded wooded area, where a man (Eastwood) walks along a porch, scrutinizing a portrait of himself in a window. This is a strikingly quiet sequence that’s gradually overtaken by the sounds of the nearby ocean, which intensify a sense of loneliness and isolation that this man appears to be experiencing. Eastwood doesn’t milk the scene though, cutting to shots of this man driving along the coast in his sports car as Dee Barton’s jaunty score lightens the mood.
This unceremonious juxtaposition between matter-of-fact melancholia (the cabin wandering) and idle pleasure (grooving in the car) resembles people’s actual emotional oscillations, and is characteristic of Eastwood’s direction of Play Misty for Me. The man is revealed to be Dave Garver, a local celebrity DJ for KRML (a real radio station) who’s a jazz aficionado like Eastwood himself. It’s quickly established that Dave has carved out a life for himself that would be the envy of macho art-minded types, hosting a jazz show at night, which is followed by drinks at the Sardine Factory (a real restaurant), where he kids around with the bartender, Murphy (Don Siegel), an aging eccentric who vicariously enjoys Dave’s womanizing, which he assists on occasion. Jocular, somewhat sexist dialogue—composed of the sort of rude jokes American movies rarely allow anymore, even if some people still talk this way—unsentimentally establish Dave as a sensitive, funny, charismatic yet selfish and manipulative cocksman who’s used to getting what he wants. Dave suggests a more likeable, though less memorable, version of the horndog Eastwood played the same year for Siegel in The Beguiled.
The coziness of these early scenes—the buddy-buddy bonhomie, the precise establishing of a real and comfortable-looking setting, the wish-fulfilment factor of Dave’s dream job and sexual virility—are paradoxically more anxiety-riven than the foreshadowing of conventional thrillers. Eastwood establishes what’s at stake to be lost, and his patience and spontaneity may inspire the viewer to wish that Play Misty for Me was simply a character study. Consequentially, we truly feel the violation that a stalker, Evelyn (Jessica Walter), represents, even if she’s also a form of poetic justice for a man who keeps women at arm’s length. But Dave isn’t made out to be an easy cartoon of male entitlement either, as he shoots straight with Evelyn, who refuses to see their first night together as the one-off that Dave assumes it to be, even if he nevertheless enjoys some of her subsequent attention.
The melancholia expressed by the opening shot gradually deepens across the film’s running time, and the ocean becomes a signpost of the fear of solitude that grows pronounced in middle age (a signpost that’s complemented by the jazz tunes on the soundtrack, especially the yearning for connection that Errol Garner’s “Misty” embodies). Play Misty for Me returns again and again to the coast throughout the narrative, sometimes allowing it to eclipse the characters, such as when Dave and the woman he loves, Tobie (Donna Mills), stroll the beach. Eastwood often doesn’t show them directly speaking, transporting their dialogue to voiceover while they walk, together yet somehow not quite together as the ocean crests on the soundtrack, seemingly articulating their longings and resentments.
The ocean motif is rendered even more explicit by Evelyn, who talks of a nightmare of drowning while Dave watches unhelpfully, which is proven at the film’s end to be a perverse sort of prophecy. Unforgettably played by Walters, Evelyn is less a monster than a ferocious manifestation of the terror of estrangement—a brunette inverse of the blond, hopeful agent of domesticity that Tobie embodies, and which Dave might be able to have if he can keep his dick in his pants. Play Misty for Me is a confident and evocative first film for Eastwood, a thriller with the loose, impressionistic swing and free-floating sting of a midnight jazz song.
Image/Sound
The image is somewhat soft, per the original theatrical presentation. There’s plenty of attractive, fine grain, and the colors are robustly varied, from the bright ocean blues to the earthy hues of the rocks and the woods. Flesh tones are also well-detailed, though the blacks are a little murky. The sound mix was never meant to be a show pony, but the jazz standards have a lovely delicacy here, and diegetic sounds are mercilessly precise, especially in the film’s violent scenes, and in the roar of the ocean. Overall, a sturdy transfer.
Extras
A new audio commentary by film scholar Tim Lucas offers a deep dive into Play Misty for Me, abounding in the sort of contextual production details that critics usually ignore. Lucas goes into the location scouting and even the general real estate of Monterey, California, for instance, and discusses how Eastwood’s interest in jazz influenced the film, while also astutely covering more traditional critical ground such as Eastwood’s subtle compositional framing. A new visual essay by film historian Howard S. Berger is nearly as painstaking, placing Play Misty for Me in the context of Eastwood’s career, while a new interview with Donna Mills covers the film’s making from an actor’s perspective. Several archive supplements have been ported over as well from past home video editions, most notably a making-of documentary from 2001 by Laurent Bouzereau that covers how Eastwood cannily brokered a deal to direct his first film (material which Lucas also covers). A “Trailer from Hell” segment by Adam Rifkin, a few other featurettes, photo galleries, TV spots, and trailers round out a solid package.
Overall
Kino Lorber outfits Clint Eastwood’s resonant, intuitive, weirdly moving directorial debut with a sturdy transfer and a few hearty new supplements.
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