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Turtles in Movies   The Beguiled (1971)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   This was made by Don Siegel, who directed a few movies starring Clint Eastwood (who stars in this one) including the original Dirty Harry. For my purposes here, this movie is about a soldier who kills a little girl's turtle, so she kills him right back. 12-year-old Amy is one of several girls in the Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies in the South during the Civil War. She keeps a pet turtle named Randolph in a box and says she loves him very much. She goes into the woods to pick some mushrooms where she discovers a wounded Union soldier, John McBurney (Clint Eastwood.) Hoping to remain hidden, he kisses her to keep her quiet and that beguiles her. She has a crush on him, and soon so do most of the females at the seminary who help to nurse McBurney back to health. When McBurney hears that there is someone named Randolph at the seminary, he is concerned that he's not the only man there until he learns that Randolph is only a turtle. A handsome soldier alone with a group of lonely women and girls is a dangerous thing, and after Eastwood is caught in bed with one of the teenage girls, he runs out of the room, falls and shatters his wounded leg. The women are forced to amputate McBurney's leg, and when he discovers it missing he goes into a drunken rage and terrorizes the females with a pistol. Hoping to calm him down, Amy runs to him, hands him the turtle, and asks him to find food for Randolph. But McBurney is so angry that he throws the turtle across the room into a wall, killing it. He immediately apologizes, but it's too late. Amy sits on the kitchen floor clutching Raldolph's bloody body. McBurney's presence becomes too dangerous for the seminary because of his violence and because they are harboring an enemy soldier, so the headmistress hints to Amy that she should pick some poisonous mushrooms they can feed to McBurney with dinner to kill him so he won't hurt anyone else. Angry at McBurney because he killed her turtle, Amy is happy to help get rid of him. She goes into the woods and picks some mushrooms for his dinner. McBurney eats a lot of them which poison and kill him. Nobody wanted to see an actor who usually plays the hero die at the end of the movie, so the movie was a flop, but that didn't stop Sophia Coppola from making it again in her version of The Beguiled, in 2017.  She also uses the turtle in the plot, so I assume that it is also in the novel the movies were based on.