(1970) Black-hatted, cheroot-smoking Hogan (Clint Eastwood) fortuitously comes upon an almost naked woman in the rough hands of three men in the Mexican desert. After he shoots the three baddies, he asks: "What the hell's a nun doing out here?" Thankful for his miraculous appearance at her time of need, Sister Sara (Shirley MacLaine), once again beneath her black habit, explains that she's on a mission: "I was confident the Lord would provide."

Dismissing his arrival as nothing more than an accident, he refuses when she insists that the bodies be covered to expend sweat over burying the dead, leaving the task to her. As he's about to depart south, leaving her to go north, a cavalry unit of the French army comes into view; she asks for another favor, to protect her from the French soldiers, since she is wanted for helping raise money for Juarez's Mexican rebels.

So begins their travels and travails together. Formerly a Confederate soldier in the recent American Civil War, he's on his way to Chihuahua to help the guerrillas under Col Beltran (Manolo Fabregas) capture the French garrison, though he has no sympathy for causes anymore; money's his only motivation. It just so happens, Sara informs Hogan, that she grew up in a convent in Chihuahua and knows the garrison well, having taught Spanish lessons there.

As they get to know each other, learning that he's never been married, she inquires: "Don't you want a woman of your own? … To share your name, bear your children, be a companion." He replies: "To ask me to quit drinking, quit gambling and save money? And to bitch about her aches and pains all day? No thanks!"

When he asks her what she does about having feelings like other women for a man, she replies that she's Christ's bride and prays until the urges pass. "All the women I've ever known were natural-born liars," he replies, "but I never knew about nuns until now." He remarks on her curious ability to handle hard liquor; she also smokes outside of his ken.

Wounded in the left shoulder by an arrow, Hogan is forced to rely on Sister Sara's holding the Indians off with her silver crucifix and then on her extracting the shaft by punching it through his shoulder and cauterizing the wound with gunpowder. Together they blow a train trestle "to hell-and-gone," preventing French troops from reaching the garrison.

The second, less entertaining half of director Don Siegel's rompish action feature (reminiscent of Eastwood's spaghetti westerns, including Ennio Morricone's score) is the battle (with plenty of pyrotechnics and stunt actors) over the garrison. By the end of the picture, several anomalies arise between what we initially are led to expect of the principal characters and their latter role reversals.

Also, when Sister Sara and Hogan set out on their journey, the nun exchanges her mule with a stone-bruised hoof for a little donkey from a village peasant, which she rides for the remainder of the story. But where's the other mule for Sara? I suppose Hogan becomes her other beast of burden.

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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