Movie Review by Bill Rendall

Unforgiven

David Webb Peoples wrote the screenplay for Unforgiven in 1976. Francis Ford Coppola had the original option on it but he let it lapse due to financial problems and Clint Eastwood bought the option. Eastwood sat on the script waiting until he was old enough for the role of an aging gunfighter.

The politically correct nineties was the right time to release a movie debunking the mythology of the classic Western. And who better to do it than Eastwood?

People's screenplay for Unforgiven is morally ambiguous in its portrayal of the main characters. This is a contrast to the classic Western where the good guy and the bad guy are clearly delineated. Initially we are sympathetic to Eastwood as we see him at his wife's grave and we see him trying to raise his young children as a poor but honest farmer. However, we find out that he is a hired killer and has callously killed women and children.

The town sheriff (Gene Hackman) has a sadistic streak but the only characters we see him treat sadistically are bounty hunters. Hackman is justified in deterring bounty hunters from coming to his town but his methods of deterrence are too harsh and result in the death of one of the bounty hunters (Morgan Freeman.)

The movie establishes sympathy for Freeman by showing us that he no longer has the stomach to kill anyone. Freeman has given up on being a bounty hunter and is riding home when he is captured by Hackman. However, Hackman doesn't know this and he has Freeman brutally whipped. In other scenes we see Hackman portrayed as a good community man doing his best to maintain law and order.

Unforgiven debunks the myth of the sharpshooter. In the classic Western the hero can kill a bad guy with one clean shot fired instantly from the hip. In truth the pistols used in the classic Western are inaccurate and unreliable. Speed and accuracy with a gun is not as important as being cold-blooded. Eastwood laconically remarks that it is a hell of a thing to kill a man.

There is nothing heroic in the way one of Eastwood's fellow bounty hunters goes about a kill. He sneaks up and shoots his victim on the toilet. The killer has poor eyesight, which serves to emphasis Eastwood's comments about what it takes to make a good killer.

Eastwood ends the movie with a heroic gunfight that could have come from one of his earlier Western roles but he dismisses it by saying he is just lucky. Unforgiven is a great update on the classic Western and richly deserves the critical praise it has received. Eastwood demonstrates talent and versatility. In addition to producing, directing and starring in Unforgiven he even provides some of the music.

What I really like about Unforgiven is that rather than being fed stereotype characters we are given real characters with virtues and vices. We have to make up our own minds about who is right and who is wrong.

Director: Clint Eastwood

Screenplay: David Webb Peoples

Music: Lennie Niehaus
 

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