Review of the film “Unforgiven”
It’s easy to believe when you watch Unforgiven, that the movie is the winner of four Oscars (moreover, Eastwood’s picture was the third Western film to be awarded for the best film of the year, the second was Dancing with the Wolves, and the first I will not mention).
This is easy to believe because Eastwood plays a very brutal character in the films of both directors. Sergio glorified Eastwood as a cool lone wielder in the Wild West. Siegel transferred a tough man to a metropolis (Dirty Harry franchise).
In Unforgiven, Eastwood also plays a person who is idolized. He is very cool, but retired, so to speak.
Eastwood acquired the script of the Unforgiven from the author, David Webb Peeples, in the early 80s, and waited ten years for the moment when he could play a major role. This moment has come. Eastwood showed himself to be “old”, but showed that there is still “gunpowder in the flasks.” It was starting from Unforgiven that he began making films about retired cool dudes, often with himself in the title role, as a director. And at the same time, he began an unobtrusive reading of morals (recall, for example, Gran Torino).
Unforgiven is a mid-stage film. Film’s hero has not yet escaped its past. Eastwood, in the classic Good, Bad, Evil Western, was relatively “good” in terms of morality, but shot perfectly. About the same thing we see in Unforgiven, a film with blurred morality, dedicated to the exciting competition of two pensioners, “who is cooler.”
But it all starts with women. In a classic small town in the wild west, covered with dust, with two or three streets covered with the same dust plus dung, there is a brothel. Two clients cut a whore. The sheriff ruled: to pay a fine by horses. A few horses – him, a few horses – a cut whore. Whores were unhappy with such a decision. Secretly, they threw themselves together and started up the state to declare: “To the one who kills the people who have left the whore is a reward.”
The elderly sheriff is played by Gene Hackman. This role, for which he received the Academy Award, as if even written for him: I immediately recall the detective Jimmy Doyle from the famous police thriller French Connected (1971), who introduced a new stream with his rigidity and realism to the genre.
A stubborn sheriff cannot catch whores “by the hand.” Even the owner of the brothel cannot catch the hand of his workers. “No fees, no ads, we promised nothing to anyone.”
In general, the sheriff intends to show who is the boss in the house and will brutally has sex with every suspect arriving in the city.
And Eastwood plays a bandit who has long forgotten about his bloody adventures, yearning for his recently deceased young wife and raising pigs on a farm. The bandit decides to make money. Moreover, in old age, he became sentimental, and he was kind of sorry for killing a woman that he slept with.
Which of the two pensioners will win?
The film could have been called some kind of “requiem for the genre” if Sam Pekinpa hadn’t filmed “The Wild Gang” in its time – a classic story about pensioners, heroes of the “last western”.Pekingpa’s film did not receive Oscar but “Unforgiven” received it. That’s all the difference.
Unforgiven filmed extremely sophisticated. Eastwood holds the reins tightly in his hands. The wild plot. Actually looks convincing which the story captures. The film has wonderful dialogues. And all the actors play great.
Three years later, greedy gangsters from Tri-Star will try to jump onto the bandwagon of an outgoing train called Western. I’m talking about the movie “Fast and Dead.” They will even invite Gene Hackman to duplicate the role he played in Unforgiven for his good grandmothers. Hackman, of course, will duplicate, one and a half million still do not lie on the road.
But as they say, feel the difference! Sam Raimi and Clint Eastwood are not the same thing at all. Unforgiven is a real western, and Fast and Dead is a silly parody on a western theme.
Sources
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/packages/html/movies/bestpictures/unforgiven-ar.html?scp=2&sq=rawhide&st=cse