Unforgiven
(1992)
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Dedicated to his mentors Sergio Leone and Don Siegel, Clint Eastwood's 1992 Oscar-winner examines the mythic violence of the Western, taking on the ghosts of his own star past. Disgusted by Sheriff Little Bill Daggett's decree that several ponies make up for a cowhand's slashing a whore's face, Big Whiskey prostitutes, led by fierce Strawberry Alice (Frances Fisher), take justice into their own hands and put a $1000 bounty on the lives of the perpetrators. Notorious outlaw-turned-hog farmer William Munny (Eastwood) is sought out by neophyte gunslinger the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) to go with him to Big Whiskey and collect the bounty. While Munny insists, I ain't like that no more, he needs the bounty money for his children, and the two men convince Munny's clean-living comrade Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) to join them in righting a wrong done to a woman. Little Bill (Oscar-winner Gene Hackman), however, has no intention of letting any bounty hunters impinge on his iron-clad authority. When pompous gunman English Bob (Richard Harris) arrives in Big Whiskey with pulp biographer W.W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek) in tow, Little Bill beats Bob senseless and promises to tell Beauchamp the real story about violent frontier life and justice. But when Munny, the true unwritten legend, comes to town, everyone soon learns a harsh lesson about the price of vindictive bloodshed and the malleability of ideas like justice. I don't deserve this, pleads Little Bill. Deserve's got nothin' to do with it, growls Munny, simultaneously summing up the insanity of western violence and the legacy of Eastwood's Man With No Name.~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide |
Winner of four Oscars, including best picture and director, this is, quite simply, one of the finest films ever made in the genre. Exploring the harsh realities of frontier life, Clint Eastwood depicts the west as an unforgiving place where tragedy strikes every time somebody draws a gun. It's clear from the fevered manner in which Saul Rubinek's dime novelist character gathers his Wild West stories from the last eyewitnesses that an era is about to pass into legend. Screenwriter David Webb Peoples reinforces this shift in attitudes through the film's understated feminism and its assertion that what once passed for law and order often had little to do with justice. Eastwood's own world-weary performance as William Munny, a retired gunslinger forced to strap on the six-shooters one last time to feed his children, is exemplary, cleverly drawing on our familiarity with his “Man with No Name” persona to convey the magnitude of the disgust that he now feels at the prospect of killing. The support playing of Morgan Freeman as his former partner, Richard Harris as vain killer English Bob and Oscar-winning Gene Hackman as the vicious Sheriff Daggett is unsurpassable. It's easy to see why Eastwood dedicated the film to Sergio Leone and Don Siegel — this is both a testament and a riposte to his work with them. Gone is the efficient, detached bloodletting of Leone's Dollars trilogy and Siegel's Dirty Harry and in its place comes the greater emphasis on character and cause and effect that ranks Eastwood alongside his two mentors, at the same time redefining the genre. You won't forgive yourself if you miss it.
Halliwell's Film Guide
Harsh Western of revenge and needless slaughter that re-invents and revives the genre to spectacular effect.