The words “failure” and “Clint Eastwood” don’t often appear in the same sentence. After all, Eastwood is not only one of the best-known actors in Hollywood history, he’s also a prestigious director. He’s an industry great without a doubt, though rarely does someone go through a career in the movies without at least one picture that they have some regrets over. In Eastwood’s case, that film is “The Beguiled.” Directed by Don Siegel, one of Eastwood’s most notable collaborators, the 1971 thriller takes place during the American Civil War. Eastwood plays Union soldier John “McBee” McBurney, who’s injured and taken in at a boarding school called the Miss Martha Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies. Matters become complicated when the various women fall for John, who laps up the attention and drives a wedge between them.
“The Beguiled” holds an impressive 90% critical approval rating and a 72% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, but it only made around $1.1 million at the domestic box office. By comparison, “Dirty Harry” made around 35 times more than that in the same year. Many still consider it to be one of Clint Eastwood’s best movies, but he considered it to be a failure on his part. “The one picture I failed in was ‘The Beguiled,'” he told Film Comment (via Far Out). “It was good for me personally, critically well-received, but it was very poor for the company that spent the money to produce it.” Eastwood added that the morally gray nature of his character may have prevented the film from becoming a big success. “He tried to do everything through the back door,” he said of McBee. “He wasn’t such a bad person; he was just trying to exist.”
What is Clint Eastwood’s worst movie according to Rotten Tomatoes?
While actors will always be invested in the box office receipts of their films, the amount of money a movie makes is ultimately the studio’s problem. And, crucially, it’s not always a mark of a bad film — in fact, there are several notorious box office bombs that are actually worth watching. There are many reasons why a good picture might underperform financially. Sometimes studio execs fail to market a film properly, allow filmmakers to go over budget, or don’t choose the right season to release a movie. Other times, it just doesn’t appeal to a wide audience, which appears to have been the case with “The Beguiled.” It’s still considered to be a success in artistic terms, something you can’t say about “Revenge of the Creature.”
Clint Eastwood’s worst movie going by the Tomatometer, “Revenge of the Creature” marked the future A-lister’s big screen debut. He has a minor role as a lab technician in the 1955 film, which is a sequel to 1954’s “Creature from the Black Lagoon.” It has a damning score of 13% on Rotten Tomatoes, with the critics not holding back. “It’s impossible to overstate how utterly tedious the central stretch of ‘Revenge of the Creature’ is,” wrote Tim Brayton, while Rob Humanick called it “Less than the sum of its maddeningly redundant parts.” Lots of big actors have embarrassing early roles, and Eastwood is no different. If you want to see him at his most iconic, check out Looper’s ranking of Eastwood’s best-ever Westerns.