Play Misty for Me (1971): The Perversion of Love

Play Misty for me, Clint Eastwood's directorial debut, is a film about ‘mellow groove’ disc jockey Dave Garver (played by Eastwood) letting himself be seduced by a young woman, Evelyn (Jessica Walter), after she has asked him to play a song for her on his radio programme. Soon after, Garver finds himself stalked by Evelyn and increasingly persecuted by her obsessional demands, just as he struggles to re-establish a serious relationship with his girlfriend Tobie (Donna Mills). He tries to contain Evelyn's seductiveness and her blackmailing tactics, but, as she becomes murderously violent, this proves an impossible task: after a series of assaults on those close to him, she attacks him with a knife. Garver punches her in self-defence and she falls to her death into the ocean.

Play Misty for me is set in Carmel, the seaside town in California to which Eastwood would be elected Democratic Mayor 15 years later. This location also gave him the opportunity to indulge in his passion for music, shooting a scene at the nearby Monterey Jazz Festival. The film was written and co-scripted by Jo Heims and is based on the narrative of one of her female friends. This collaboration between Heims and Eastwood enriches both the female and male perspectives of the protagonists, and gives further depth to the accuracy of their psychological depiction. Although famous for his action movies such as Sergio Leone's ‘Spaghetti Westerns’ and the violent thriller Dirty Harry and its sequels, Clint Eastwood is in fact a liberal-minded and thoughtful individual (Bingham, 1994; Douglas, 1974; Smith, 1993) who detests violence and has shown its horrific consequences in many of his later films. Baker argues that it was indeed with Play Misty for me that Eastwood's ‘deconstruction’ of his own screen persona, as ‘the prototypical macho male Hollywood hero: cold, refractory, cruel, sadistic, murderous, ferocious and seemingly invulnerable’ (1999, p. 821), actually started. The traditional myth of mascu