western directed
by : Clint Eastwood featuring
: Clint Eastwood - Gene Hackman - Morgan Freeman - Richard Harris - Jaimz
Woolvett running
time : 2 hours 15 minutes
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 (Francis 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 (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.
Appearing
two years after Kevin Costner's Oscar-winning megahit Dances With Wolves,
Unforgiven helped spur a mini-revival of the moribund genre in the 1990s
that included Posse (1993), Tombstone (1993), and Sharon Stone's "Man With
No Name" turn in The Quick And The Dead (1995). Written by David Webb Peoples
in 1976, the script was bought by Eastwood in the early '80s, though he
waited until he was old enough to play psychotic antihero William Munny
as a grizzled veteran of a bloody past, rather than someone closer to the
younger Eastwood of Leone's "Dollars" trilogy and Siegel's Dirty Harry
(1971). Upon its release in August 1992, seven years after Eastwood's previous
western Pale Rider, Unforgiven was praised as an uncompromising revisionist
masterpiece, showcasing Eastwood's visual command of western landscapes
and locations and his perceptive yet critical view of the genre's mythology
and his own place in its "machinery of violence." After deliberately pacing
the reemergence of Munny's pathology, Eastwood shrouds the climactic shoot-out
in cinematographer Jack N.Green's dark shadows and heavy rainfall reminiscent
of film noir, rendering Munny's return to Eastwood's lethal star form unsettling
in its victory. Unforgiven became an unexpected serious hit in a season
of popcorn movies, eventually grossing over $100 million and reviving Eastwood's
star standing after a series of late '80s flops. After winning several
critics' prizes, it became one of only a handful of westerns to win the
Best Picture Oscar; Eastwood's status behind the camera was finally acknowledged
with a Best Director statuette.
