Unforgiven (1992)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
William Munny is a retired, once-ruthless killer turned gentle widower and hog farmer. To help support his two motherless children, he accepts one last bounty-hunter mission to find the men who brutalized a prostitute. Joined by his former partner and a cocky greenhorn, he takes on a corrupt sheriff.
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23 films that influenced Unforgiven
What critics say influenced Unforgiven
The graying gunfighters of David Webb Peoples's acutely observant script recall such classic films as John Ford's Searchers, Howard Hawks's El Dorado and Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country.
What Eastwood does with that anti-character here is similar to what Sean Connery did with the James Bond character in "Never Say Never Again" or what Sam Peckinpah did with the aging western heroes in "Ride the High Country."
For "Unforgiven," the story of a reformed killer who re-confronts his past, is very definitely an old-guy Western, as elegiac in its own way as such classics as "The Wild Bunch" and "Ride the High Country."
There are all sorts of shades of gray in this interesting end-of-the-trail Western, which combines the theme about legends and gunfighters with the sad-but-triumphant elegiac tone of "The Shootist," John Wayne's last Western.
Then they settle down to tell a vivid story of a vengeful, explosive showdown, with echoes of "Shane," "The Wild Bunch" and Henry King's wonderful 1950 Western about a reluctant legend, "The Gunfighter."
In other movies that have studied the outlaw spirit -- "Bonnie and Clyde," "The Wild Bunch" and even "Thelma and Louise" -- the bad boys, no matter how lovable, have followed the dictates of their melancholy profession, taken their wages and have died.
For "Unforgiven," the story of a reformed killer who re-confronts his past, is very definitely an old-guy Western, as elegiac in its own way as such classics as "The Wild Bunch" and "Ride the High Country."
Then they settle down to tell a vivid story of a vengeful, explosive showdown, with echoes of "Shane," "The Wild Bunch" and Henry King's wonderful 1950 Western about a reluctant legend, "The Gunfighter."
In many ways, especially in its determination not to glorify bloodshed, The Wild Bunch shares key themes with Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven -- only this film came twenty-three years earlier.
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The graying gunfighters of David Webb Peoples's acutely observant script recall such classic films as John Ford's Searchers, Howard Hawks's El Dorado and Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country.
But try finding a sense of sacred history in Red River, Rio Bravo or El Dorado To Howard Hawks, the West often seemed to be nothing more than a convenient place where men could hang around and pretend to fight, though they really were in love with each other.
And so Unforgiven is to Eastwood what The Searchers was to Wayne.
The movie is a revisionist Western; a genre that, depending on your perspective, started sometime in the '60s, '70s, or with this very motion picture, and which seeks to replace the frothy Romantic idea of a morally untroubled American frontier, as depicted in such undemanding matinee adventures as The Searchers and The Naked Spur and such * , with a grimmer, more consequential depiction of the violence and cruelty and muddy nastiness of a world inhabited by the men and women (but mostly men) who would hear stories of a lawless wilderness largely untouched by human society and the "civilization" of the east, and think that sounded like exactly the right place to be.
Travis Bickle of "Taxi Driver" seems to be hovering somewhere in the ether.
Yet Eastwood ups the ante and turns the meanings around: When Ned is captured and killed, Will tanks up on whiskey -- the town's name is maybe a bit much symbolically, but what the hell, I like it -- and goes on a Taxi Driver-like rampage.
As "True Grit" was for John Wayne, this is also something of a last hurrah for Eastwood's "man-with-no-name" persona, but because Eastwood is who he is, it is a dark and ominous goodby, brooding and stormy.
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Some writers have called "Unforgiven" Eastwood's "High Noon," but it's really closer to being his "Billy Jack."
Even Gene Hackman, as the marshall who tries to maintain order in the revenge-mad town, has a sadistic streak that stains his "High Noon" image as a man protecting a community from killers.
"High Noon" it isn't; it's more like the darkest midnight of the American soul.
The movie is a revisionist Western; a genre that, depending on your perspective, started sometime in the '60s, '70s, or with this very motion picture, and which seeks to replace the frothy Romantic idea of a morally untroubled American frontier, as depicted in such undemanding matinee adventures as The Searchers and The Naked Spur and such * , with a grimmer, more consequential depiction of the violence and cruelty and muddy nastiness of a world inhabited by the men and women (but mostly men) who would hear stories of a lawless wilderness largely untouched by human society and the "civilization" of the east, and think that sounded like exactly the right place to be.