‘We don’t have a goddam thing between us...’
While the ultimate obsessed fan movie will always be Misery, Clint Eastwood’s Play Misty for Me predates Rob Reiner’s film by almost two decades and in places, it’s almost as chilling. Eastwood’s directorial debut contains many of the elements that would define his career behind the camera for the next fifty years (and counting): simple storytelling, dark themes, moral dilemmas… it’s all here…
Dave Garver (Eastwood) is a smooth radio DJ who plays jazz standards for KRML radio in Carmel, California. Every night, a woman with a seductive voice rings the station and asks Garver to “play ‘Misty'” for her. When Evelyn (Jessica Walter), the voice at the end of the telephone, comes roaring into Garver’s life very much in the flesh, it is clear that she loves more than just jazz music.
While it was initially jarring to see Bluth matriarch Jessica Walter as a younger woman, her undeniable chemistry with Eastwood is one of the film’s many plus points. She certainly isn’t the first ‘mad’ woman on screen, there is a clear lineage from Walter’s performance here to the Yuppie Nightmare movies of the ’80s such as Single White Female and Fatal Attraction. It’s an enjoyably demented, wild-eyed turn that is so successful that Eastwood seems genuinely alarmed at times.
Filmed on location in Carmel. Eastwood captures the subtle Americana of small-town California, and while the scenes shot at the Monterey Jazz Festival are a little incongruous with the sinister tone of the rest of the movie, they are visually compelling and also help to break up the relentlessness of Evelyn’s obsession. Another scene in which Evelyn confronts Garver at a business dinner is so excruciatingly embarrassing that it is tough to sit through – Eastwood sells Garver’s utter horror at the situation perfectly.
Play Misty for Me has been somewhat forgotten about in the context of Eastwood’s oeuvre, but as expected, it’s an extremely competent and effective psychological thriller and the start of an astonishing directorial career for Clint Eastwood.