Year of Eastwood #17

Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970)

Starring: Eastwood,
Shirley MacLaine
Directed by Don Siegel

My dream job would be making up titles for movies. It takes a real skill to come up with the right combination of words that will not only drill a spot in the public’s mind like a bad TV commercial - but also create enough interest to draw in a crowd to plunk down $10 to take a seat in the theatre (or in this case, add the movie to my Netflix queue). There’s a few tried and true strategies to coming up with a winning title. There’s the old stand-by literary trick of alliteration: Leaving Las Vegas or Bedtime for Bonzo (just try to name another Reagan movie). Or mixing together a few words in an unexpected way: Raising Arizona or Snakes on a Plane. An online search can produce several gerund (the ...ing thing) movie titles: Being John Malkovich or Driving Miss Daisy.

Every now and then a movie title will come along that boggles the mind. Some just seem to be lacking of any effort: Derailed (what about that title will make me think of the Jennifer Aniston movie?) and some smack of effort to the point it makes people want to avoid the movie simply out of spite: the Darjeeling Ltd.

An Inconvenient Truth may cut to the heart of the matter but how am I supposed to make a connection between this and an Al Gore powerpoint presentation? (Here’s an inconvenient truth for you: If Gore would have carried his home state of Tennessee then Florida wouldn‘t have even mattered.) Nine times out of ten a good title equals a good movie: Empire Strikes Back = excellent, but Phantom Menace = wtf?

Song titles are an easy route to a movie title. There’s already a connection between the song and the public ... so just throw a few scenes together and slap it up on the screen: Pretty in Pink or Stand by Me. A person could use the Cure catalogue alone to make up a whole slew of movie titles: Love Cats, Why Can’t I Be You, Pictures of You, Just Like Heaven (guess that one’s already been done), or Boys Don’t Cry (hmmm, guess someone already had my idea).

Clint’s had his share of the good: Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Play Misty for Me; the bad: Firefox, the Rookie; and the ugly: Beguiled, Coogan’s Bluff. Two Mules for Sister Sara is promising as a movie title. Where did these two mules come from? And who exactly is Sister Sara? Is it a gift for Sister Sara or is it some kind of trade: one Sara is good for two mules? The interesting thing is there’s only one mule in the movie, so who’s the other mule? … Clint?

The pairing of Clint and Shirley had me anticipating a mad-cap romp of witty one-liners from Sister Shirley and disgruntled squints from Clint. There really isn’t much amusing in Two Mules. I guess Shirley just isn’t that funny as a nun … a lesson apparently ignored by Burt while he was driving around in his Trans Am dreaming up Cannonball Run II. Turns out Shirley isn’t really a nun, just a Mexican whore who must get some interesting requests if she's got to break out the nun costume every now and then. At least there’s lots of ‘splosions at the end of the movie.