Unforgiven

[baumer]

Discuss

[Moviedweeb]

I loved the movie with the exception of the Schofield kid. I liked the character but not the performance. I'm looking forward to the remake starring Ken Wantanabe (The Last Samurai, Inception). http://www.slashfilm.com/japanese-unforgiven-teaser-ken-watanabe-takes-over-a-clint-eastwood-signature-role/

[darkelf]

The beginning is a little slow and Clint repeats the same thing too many times but the pace is built perfectly and all the performances are stellar. The ending is one of the most suspenseful ever.

 

9/10

 

That shot when he takes his first drink is brilliant.

[Lordmandeep]

This film really just spits in the face of the old western genre but into a good way.

 

Shows how hard and unforgiving it was. 

[Joel M]

An absolute masterpiece from start to finish. 

[luna]

so, violence is bad, but you can partially redeem yourself if you stop drinking and stay faithful to your dead wife? come on. conservative as hell, but that should be no surprise given eastwood's political leanings.

[Jake Gittes]

Rewatched this over the weekend. Pretty excellent, though not as brilliant as I remembered it being - it keeps beating you over the head with its main message, and sometimes feels more like a statement than a movie; that's not an inherently bad thing, but the movie felt almost too constructed to me, built entirely around its core idea, and that has a side effect of coming off as artificial.

 

So while I appreciated the commentary on violence itself, the more compelling thing for me was the exploration of how the legends of the Old West were gradually shaped out of tales of completely unheroic drunkards shooting people. It's a theme present in almost every scene but I never felt like it was forced on me, even though English Bob's whole function is to add to that theme and then get out. It pays off in the end, when you realize that Munny, despite what is repeatedly said of him, isn't evil incarnate who "killed women and children and just about everything that walks or crawls", just like that prostitute wasn't mutilated to an absurd extent like everyone believes her to be. He was much more likely just a drunk asshole who was pretty good with a gun and had luck on his side, but time and talk transformed him into a feared legend. The commentary on heroes and villains - Munny certainly isn't the former and Little Bill is not exactly the latter, and the story slyly forces you to confront that while unfolding in an entirely straightforward way - is also well done.

 

Hackman gives the standout performance, especially in the scene where he dares Beauchamp to shoot him. (That whole sequence might be my favorite in the film, and it functions like a brilliant short film). The cinematography and production design are both stunning, and the dialogue feels natural and striking whenever it isn't used to bluntly express the Themes. ("I'll see you in hell, William Munny". - "Yeah". Chills right there.) Overall, it's imperfect but still probably my favorite Eastwood so far behind HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER. 

 

so, violence is bad, but you can partially redeem yourself if you stop drinking and stay faithful to your dead wife? come on. conservative as hell, but that should be no surprise given eastwood's political leanings.

 

That's pretty far from the point of the movie. Yeah, he does attempt to redeem himself, and stopping drinking and killing and staying faithful to his dead wife is as good a way of doing that as any, considering above all when and where the movie is set. Except what the ending clearly says is that he can't redeem himself - he's drawn back to killing like a drunk to a bottle - and in the final scenes, Eastwood underlines both the primal appeal of violence - what draws men to it no matter how far they attempt to get away from it - and its ugliness. In a lot of ways it's a much more complex film than you seem to be giving it credit for. (So is Eastwood himself, for that matter - he's not the guy you can just put into a "conservative" box and move on). 

Edited March 2, 2015 by Jake Gittes