I'm not certain how much I would like "Unforgiven" if I had never seen a Western before. I suspect I would still consider it a masterpiece. But approaching it from the perspective of decades of watching "Cowboys and Indians", I view Clint Eastwood's Oscar winner as one of the most important achievements in film history.
Eastwood created the Man With No Name personna in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, masterpieces that changed the genre. But Unforgiven elevates "The Western" to a level I think will never be approached again. "Unforgiven" is to The Western as "The Godfather" is to the gangster movie.
In old Lone Ranger era Westerns the hero wore a white hat and dispatched bad guys in morally unambiguous gunfights. By the end of John Wayne's career in cowboy pictures heroes weren't as clearly defined. In pictures like "The Searchers" and "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" the heroes had skeletons in their closets. Then Leone's films made the West seem an even grittier, sweatier place, and there was more than a little anti-hero in the leading characters. Still, gunfights happened quickly and the winner was always a dead-eye who could shoot the wings off a gnat at a hundred paces. The losers of gunfights fell quickly and silently to their death.
In Unforgiven Eastwood gives us a vision we can imagine as closer to the truth. His character William Munny was once "a known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition," as we're told in the opening title card. We learn Bill Munny was once the most dangerous of a group of outlaws in hints that are given leading up to the climax. But Munny has been changed by marriage. His comely wife has died of smallpox, leaving him a poor pig farmer with two children. He hasn't shot at a man in eleven years. We can feel his struggle for redemption. In addition to giving up his previous life as a criminal, he has stopped drinking and, when given the opportunity at a woman younger and prettier than him, he declines out of respect for his dead wife.
But Bill Munny's demons are old and powerful. A group of prostitutes pool their money and spread the word that they'll pay a bounty for the death of a bad-tempered cowboy who cuts one of them. Jaimz Woolvett plays The Schofield Kid, who has heard of William Munny and how he was the meanest cold-blooded killer alive. Munny initially declines the Kid's offer, but the Munny family is poor, and the prostitutes' bounty is tempting.
Bill rounds up old partner Ned Logan, played by the always brilliant Morgan Freeman. You get the feeling that Ned wasn't as bad as Munny in the old days, but you also get the idea that Ned isn't as "reformed" as Munny.
Gene Hackman gives a superlative performance as Little Bill Daggett, the Sheriff of the town with the prostitutes. In an early scene Daggett beats bounty hunter "English Bob" (played by the late, great Richard Harris) half to death, and vows to do worse to any other bounty hunter's seeking the "whores' gold".
Unforgiven re-writes the legend of the west. Shifting shades of grey replace black and white. The Man With No Name could shoot a gnat mid-flight, but William Munny takes shooting practice at a tin can with a pistol, misses several shots, then finally dispatches the can with a shotgun blast. The gunfight losers in old school westerns did their dying quickly and quietly, while a victim in this film dies slowly, in agony and begging for a drink of water.
In an expository scene halfway through Hackman explains to a hack writer (acting as a one-man Greek chorus and wonderfully played by Saul Rubinek) that the stories of famous gunfights that circulated among taverns and dime novels of the day were wild exaggerations made up by the survivors to make themselves look faster and deadlier and more noble than they really were.
Eastwood gives a master's class in film story-telling. He tells us - then he shows us. Every other Western appears a wolf-in-sheep's clothing in comparison. This film is the whole Wolf, and makes no apologies about it. If a greater Western than "Unforgiven" is ever made - I can't wait to see it.
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Unforgiven Blu ray - Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman play retired, down-on-their-luck outlaws who pick up their guns one last time to collect a bounty offered by the vengeful prostitutes of the remote Wyoming town of Big Whiskey. Richard Harris is an ill-fated interloper, a colorful killer-for-hire called English Bob. And Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner Gene Hackman is the sly and brutal local sheriff whose brand
