The film begins as he goes to his job at a Carmel radio station where he gets a call from a woman who asks him to play the song ‘Misty.’ It is clearly not the first time she has requested this. After he comes off work he goes to a bar run by Dirty Harry director Don Siegel in his first movie role. Siegel claims that a solitary woman (Jessica Walter) that Eastwood is eyeing is waiting for someone and has been resisting advances all night.
Seeing this as a challenge rather than a warn-off, Eastwood tries his luck: he plays a game of chess with Siegel and slowly arouses her interest, or so he thinks. We can recognize Walter’s voice from the call to the radio station, and her fixed gaze on Eastwood as he looks at the game certainly reveals that she was waiting for him to show up. She eventually admits this to him, but not before letting him think he has worked a brilliant ploy.
She stays over at his house with a promise of ‘no strings attached,’ but – perhaps surprisingly to us – there is no sexual scene shown with them. Eastwood (the director) isn’t interested in salaciousness and there wouldn’t be any other point in having such a scene. His DJ clearly doesn’t take their relationship any more seriously than a brief fling, and he generally has a number of girlfriends going at once.
Walter, however, is quite aggressive, and brings groceries to his house for an impromptu supper. He’s upset by this – what if another woman was there? – but agrees to have dinner with her. Eastwood is a pretty narcissistic guy in this movie as he doesn’t seem at all worried by her obsessiveness: he’s used to having girls falling hard for him so her behavior seems only natural to him.
He continues this relationship but soon learns of an old girlfriend (Donna Mills, who reminds me of Jane Fonda without the abrasiveness) coming back to town and decides to get back together with her and give up his playboy lifestyle. In turn, he decides to wind things up with Walter but she won’t have it, often running into him and even wrecking a business lunch he’s spent some time preparing for.
Finally she turns violent – first against herself in a suicide attempt, then against Eastwood’s housekeeper who walks in while she’s vandalizing his house. After the latter outburst she is sent to a sanitarium.
These first two-thirds of the film are very effective: we can see Walter’s increasingly dangerous obsessiveness, but it’s not made so obvious that we can’t believe Eastwood takes so long to notice. That Eastwood himself is willing to be a pretty self-absorbed guy also makes this believable.
The final half-hour is not quite as good. This is partly because it has been imitated so many times since, but also because Eastwood as director is not quite as steady here – especially in the final showdown. Previously restrained in not using too many heavy-handed closeups or zooms to get the menace across, he indulges in this a few times, along with a rather improbable plot twist (and an even more improbable discovery made by Eastwood’s character).
He also features a walking-in-the woods montage (punctuated by the only sex in the film) that is too long, but he partially salvages things by often shooting it very wide so we can see the woods around them and can look around to see if they’re being followed (earlier in the film we have just such a shot with a very nice payoff). He also shows them in a pretty good crowd scene afterward where we watch even more carefully, but the sense of danger isn’t as potent as in the film’s first hour or so. It just seems too obligatory a sequence.
The final confrontation between Eastwood and Walter delivers some excitement but, again, not as much as it should. The editing is a little off here and the falling figure at the end is too obviously a dummy. The very last shot, at least, is well-done: it provides a nice mirror to the opening shot and lets us see Walter as a sad figure rather than as the purely murderous nut she has become by the end of the movie.
When watching this film a viewer today will inevitably think of Fatal Attraction, though there is one very important difference between the two films: in the latter, Glenn Close is less obviously dangerous than Jessica Walter is here, which is why the violent climax of that film felt so false. The finale of Play Misty for Me is a little more believable because Walter’s character is more prone to angry outbursts from early in the story.
Jessica Walter has been frequently, and justly, praised for what she did in this film. It’s too bad that she wasn’t in very many films – perhaps she was too convincing in the role. Eastwood, in contrast, is often overlooked for his onscreen work here, but he’s also very good as the film’s straight man who’s careless with the affections of women.
As a director he does quite well by not overly-sensationalizing the story. There’s no pumped-up musical score or a lot of ominous close-ups. Perhaps the best example of Eastwood’s understated approach to things is his first meeting with Walter at the bar: instead of frequent cuts to close-ups of her eyes or something we might get from another director, we usually see both of them in the same shot as she watches him play his game with the bartender. This is all we need to understand what’s happening, and it’s in keeping with the style he has used ever since – essentially to make everything clear but not obvious to us.
Eastwood is rather difficult to classify as a filmmaker – perhaps why he took so long to be recognized properly. There are no postmodern winks at the audience, flashy directorial flourishes or posing ambiguities that we might expect from a European director (or their American imitators), but no excessive ramming home of the story’s themes that we might get from an old-style director like John Ford. The emphasis is on the storytelling and characters, which is decidedly old-school, but with the actors (particularly the supporting players) generally better-used than you might find in a 1940s film.
Over the years this movie has often been called misogynist but, if anything, it’s an argument for men to be more careful with their relationships and to pay more attention to those who care for them. Yes, Jessica Walter’s character is a very troubled (and ultimately very dangerous) woman, but Eastwood also gets himself into this problem partly because of his cavalier attitude towards her. He doesn’t underline this point too heavily but it is there. Even this early in his career he was gently criticizing the mindless macho attitudes and qualities that so many careless critics accused him of celebrating instead.
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