I’d forgotten that before Clint’s Dave Garver slugs Jessica Walter’s knife-wielding Evelyn Draper — pow! — and sends her plunging to a rocky seaside death, Walter gives Donna Mills’ Tobie Williams a severe haircut.
That has to be one of the ugliest and creepiest things a cinematic serial killer has ever done to a victim — “Before I stab you to death I’m going to chop off half of your Jane Fonda-in-Klute hair.”
Clint was a young-looking 40 when he directed and starred; Walter was 29, Mills was 30 or 31, and John Larch, who played the amiable, well-dressed, Martin Balsam-like detective, was in his late 50s.
Evelyn and Glenn Close’s Alex Forrest are birds of a feather. Evelyn is a bit more manic and unhinged —almost an AIP horror film character — but they both slash their wrists in Act Two and threaten the hero’s significant domestic other during the climax.
The sexual ethos of Play Misty For Me (‘71) presents Dave, a KRML deejay who drives an Austin Healy and lives in a cliffside bungalow, as an innocent libertine. By 2024 standards mellow Dave is almost the bad guy — a handsome, low-key hound who gets laid whenever and with whomever (pick of the litter!) with a general understanding that casual, no-big-deal affairs are part of the no-strings nookie game of the Nixon era. No internet or social media spears or frowning feminist currents — an exotic world as different from our own as Tolkien’s Middle Earth.
