Unforgiven: The Movie

[tartysuz]

Holy crap, Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven does not loose its impact upon third watch.

I'd been thinking about it since seeing the Cohen brothers' True Grit in November, and finally decided to watch Unforgiven after Friday night's episode of SPN, which was also called Unforgiven.

Here's what I found interesting about the film this time around:

• It's a movie about storytelling. In the Wild West, people's reputations are based not as much on deed as on story. The best way to seem like a bad ass is to talk a good game have a biographer along to embellish your stories. The seemingly minor, comic relief character (Saul Rubinek) turns out to be key to a major theme of the movie. He rides in with apparently hot stuff English Bob (Richard Harris), but drifts to whomever seems to have a better story. Beauchamp -- whose name means beautiful field, calling up images of an empty landscape -- is not loyal to anyone, but to the next most sensational story.
  
  
• William Munny (Clint Eastwood) is a quiet, poor, pig farmer widower, who is approached by a young man for help to bag the $1,000 reward for killing two men who, in the film's terms, cut up a whore. Munny has a reputation for being "as cold as the snow, with no nerve, no fear." But Munny tell the kid that he's not that guy any more, saying that he changed after settling down with a woman and starting a family. He still mourns his wife, who died of TB three years before. She was his conscience. During the course of the movie, Munny is unable to act on the killings while he still mourns her. But Munny's living conscience is his old partner, Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman). Munny cuts Ned in on the mission, but he hesitates to kill the first target, a young man. Ned realizes he doesn't have the stomach for it anymore and leaves early, heading back to the homestead he has with a native woman, Sally Two Trees. But locals capture him and turn Ned in to the town's dictatorial sheriff, Little Bill (Gene Hackman). Little Bill, whose word is law, tortures Ned to death. Ned's death symbolizes the Munny's last tie to a kinder, gentler outlaw. Munny returns and kills a saloonful of men, including Little Bill.
  
  
• There are no flashbacks, so we only have everyone's word that Munny was a mad, bad and dangerous man. How do we know it was the truth?
  
  1. He never wants to talk about it, unlike English Bob, who runs off at the mouth.
     
  2. He's the only character who underestimates the number of people he's killed. He doesn't even like hearing stories about the old days.
     
  3. Sally Two Trees knew what Munny was, and so did not like to see Ned ride out with him.
     
  4. Unlike English Bob and Little Bill, Munny refuses the services of the biographer.
     
  5. When Munny enters the saloon where Ned's body is propped up to ward off other bounty hunters, the camera is not positioned behind his head, which is to be expected, but behind his gun: it's as if Munny has become the gun. He then proceeds to kill five men in about 15 seconds. None of it is joyful, nor does he take pride in it.
  
  
• Were the town's working women right to put up that reward and attract even more violence and killing to town? A similar dilemma was posited in both True Grit and SPN. How far does one go in the pursuit of justice? How much are you willing to risk yourself, and what are you willing to demand of others?
  

Comments

[librarygorilla.livejournal.com]

One thing that occurred to me after watching it a couple of times is that it flips the classic western format - our heroes are a pack of assassins coming into the town and the bad guy is the sheriff trying to stop them.

Little Bill is an interesting character - while he's very clearly a bastard, he actually seems to be doing a good job at what he's supposed to be doing.

[tartysuz.livejournal.com]

it flips the classic western format - our heroes are a pack of assassins coming into the town and the bad guy is the sheriff trying to stop them

Great observation!

while he's very clearly a bastard, he actually seems to be doing a good job at what he's supposed to be doing

I'm not so sure about that. The town doesn't seem to be able to thrive while he's ruling it with fear and fiats. Note the state of his house: he'll never be able to complete it because its foundations are not sound and the walls are not upright, and everyone knows it, but is too afraid to say anything to him or insult him with an offer of help. He nearly took Beauchamp's head off for making a crack about firing the carpenter as the rain came in leaking everywhere.