Play Misty For Me – Of Fatal Attractions!

In our weekly column, Thriller Thursdays, we recommend specially-curated thrillers that’ll send a familiar chill down your spine.

Play Misty for Me immediately puts you into a queasy mood. There’s the turbulence of a rough sea, in the very first scene, conjoined with the rugged beauty of a scarred rocky coastline, slowly revealing the lanky handsome figure of Clint Eastwood surveying it all. And then a windswept coastline road on which he speeds his car against a jagged cliffside. The portends are all there – the beauty and the treachery.

We should celebrate Play Misty for Me for so many reasons. It was the emergence of Eastwood as a director, who went on to make resounding classics. It is probably the first film which had traction with a murderous lady stalker. And last but not the least, it was one of the few times when we saw the attenuated muscular Eastwood completely naked, and making love to not one but two women!

Play Misty for Me is the beginning of the worst nightmare a date night could end up with – obsession. It’s set in Carmel-by-the-Sea near Monterey (remember Big Little Lies?) and Clint Eastwood as Dave Garver is an RJ who works the graveyard shift. And he’s a sensitive one, intersperses poetry with the songs and takes calls as he spins the discs. And there’s one woman who calls him every night, and only says one thing “Play Misty for Me”. Well, that’s Errol Garner’s classic number ‘Misty’.  First warning bell – ignored.

Dave is a player, his girlfriend left him because she couldn’t cope with his continuous ‘skirt-chasing’. One night he drops into his favourite bar and encounters a lovely girl – Evelyn Draper (Jessica Walter). And guess what, she’s the Misty girl. A quick drink and they are at her house. He says he’s committed but she asks why don’t they just have a one-night stand.  He hesitates and she almost desperately growls “Don’t you like me?” And you know something is off. But temptation always wins. Second warning bell – ignored.

Lo and behold, come the next day and she is in his house with an armful of fruits, meat and veggies. Endearing or creepy? Dave is uncertain, and the inherent streak in ordinary humans of decency, also makes him appreciate the gesture. Oh but she’s got plans and she stays the night. However, things begin to unravel when she gets unhinged when a neighbour shouts at them. He looks at her perplexed. And the things that seemed a bit off suddenly turn into major red flags. But, of course, he does nothing. Third warning bell – gnored.

And then Dave's girlfriend Tobie (Donna Mills) makes a reappearance, and romance kindles again. But there's the question of the now omnipresent Evelyn. And very soon, the warning bells become Code Red with blaring horns and red lights, and things go completely off the rails, with incredibly debilitating results.

Seeing the film now, after 50 years of its release, gives us a sense of déjà vu, and we know where the story is going. But what Clint Eastwood does with his pacing and Jessica Walter does with her unhinged bravura immersion as Evelyn is to give the story a scary impetus. There’s a terrifying luncheon business date which goes incredibly bad. And that’s the inflexion point when things go from obsession to stalking to plain mayhem.

There are two lovely twists in the end, and a denouement in which Edgar Allan Poe’s memorable poem Annabel Lee makes an appearance - and one cannot take that lightly! The film is beautifully shot, and one can see the love Eastwood has for the place, within which he has an ongoing presence. The sea comes again and again as a leitmotif of turbulence inside and outside. There’s a landscape montage against Roberta Flack’s gorgeous “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” which is definitely a pitch for the Monterey tourist department!

It’s a tightly-made film, but with a pacing which even in its most terrifying moments never seems frenetic. It’s almost as if Eastwood the Actor is telling Eastwood the Director - “Hey I’m here, things are in control!” But, for the life of me, I have not been able to understand the whole point of the sequence of the Monterey Jazz Festival being inserted, almost randomly, during which the film comes to a grinding halt, though we do get to hear the fantastic Johnny Otis belting out Willie And The Hand Jive for long minutes!

Play Misty for Me is, in a sense, a great predecessor for everything from The Crush to Fatal Attraction which took Misty’s template and increased the femme fatale aspect to incendiary levels. And when someone like Glenn Close got her teeth into the role, the purring had nothing but danger embedded in it for the horny errant male!

For a film suffused as it is, with poetry - both in words and imagery - I cannot help but end with the first poem Dave fishes out for his radio show, the utterly moving 'O Fiery River ' by Kenneth Patchen -

"O fiery river

Flow out over the land.

Men have destroyed the roads of wonder,

And their cities squat like black toads

In the orchards of life.

Nothing is clean, or real, or as a girl,

Naked to love, or to be a man with.

The arts of this American land

Stink in the air of mountains;

What has made these men sick rats

That they find out every cheap hole?

How can these squeak of greatness?

Push your drugstore-culture into the sewer

With the rest of your creation.

The bell wasn't meant to toll for you.

Keep your filthy little hands off it.

O fiery river

Spread over this American land.

Drown out the falsity, the smug contempt

For what does not pay…

What would you pay Christ to die again?"

Trivia:

1. Carmel-by-the-Sea, where the movie is set, is the city where Clint Eastwood became the Mayor.
2. The film's shooting finished shooting four days before schedule and almost $50,000 under budget.
3. The story has a verisimilitude attached to the story because Clint Eastwood had a real-life experience with this many years back when an ex-girlfriend started to stalk him and, when he broke up with her, threatened to commit suicide.
4. Fatal Attraction is considered an unofficial remake of Play Misty for Me. And in turn, Swimfan is considered an unofficial remake of Fatal Attraction!

Watch Play Misty For Me here.

(Views expressed in this piece are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent those of OTTplay)

(Written by Sunil Bhandari, a published poet and host of the podcast ‘Uncut Poetry’)