The Hip Pocket #36: TWO MULES FOR SISTER SARA

An Irresistible Force meets The American West and the results are charming

There is no single canon.
We all have movies we love.

Some of them are great movies. Some of them are terrible movies. Love does not care. Love is unreasonable. Love is blind. We love what we love, and the louder you love it, the better.

One of my favorite things is sharing a film I love with someone. Even if they don't love it the same way I do, that experience imparts something about you to that person. When you share something you love, you are sharing a part of yourself, and there is nothing more vulnerable or personal than that.

I don't think of these movies as the canon or the official library or anything that formal. These are all just movies I keep in my hip pocket, movies I've filed away as part of my own personal ongoing film festival as worthwhile and notable.

This is an ongoing list, one without an ending. This is The Hip Pocket.

Two Mules For Sister Sara
Shirley MacLaine, Clint Eastwood, Manolo Fábregas, Alberto Morin, Armando Silvestre, John Kelly, David Povall, Ada Carrasco, Pancho Córdoa, José Chávez, Pedro Galvan, Jose Angel Espinosa, Enrique Lucero, Aurora Muñoz, Xavier Marc, Hortensia Santoveña, Rosa Furman, José Torvay, Margarito Luna, Xavier Massé
cinematography by Gabriel Figuero
music by Ennio Morricone
screenplay by Albert Maltz
story by Budd Boetticher
produced by Caroll Case and Martin Rackin
directed by Don Siegel
Rated GP
1 hr 56 mins

The term “movie star” has become fairly loaded in any conversation among hardcore film fans because it means different things to different people. Some people pin it on economics, calling Tom Cruise and Will Smith the last of the conventional movie stars. Even that doesn’t seem to be true anymore, though, based on the way something like The Mummy or Collateral Beauty can go belly-up even with the movie star front and center. I think opening a movie and representing a certain amount of average box-office around the world is certainly a metric for measuring stardom, but it’s not the one that really matters.

A movie star is someone you want to watch, no matter what. It’s that simple. You watch them because they are compelling, because the camera can’t get enough of them, and because they make things more interesting simply by showing up. Movie stardom is impossible to quantify, because not everyone reacts to the same stars the same way. When I was young, there was a definite canon that my parents believed in, and I was raised watching their movie stars. When I started making my own choices about movies, there were movie stars I felt more possessive of. Harrison Ford, for example, belonged to my generation. He was Han Solo. He was Indiana Jones. He belonged to us.

But for my father, Clint Eastwood was the movie star he could claim as his. His generation owned Steve McQueen and Bruce Lee and Lee Marvin and absogoddamnlutely Clint Eastwood. Clint’s stardom wasn’t automatic, either. Some actors walk onscreen and they immediately pop and they’re the center of attention and you get it. Eastwood started working in the mid-‘50s, playing background military characters in monster movies. The first time he actually got a credit was for a Francis The Talking Mule movie. He moved back and forth from movies to TV for the rest of the decade, finally landing his breakthrough role as Rowdy Yates on Rawhide in 1959.