I thought it was a good, entertaining Western. I don’t think it was great movie, though.
Exactly
I hope you’re a girl and can have my babies.
Or, do you have a sister?
I’ll sell you my sister cheap. Cost you 3 Dr Pepper bottle caps and a broken yo-yo. A steal at twice the price!
It would be a tedious world indeed if we all agreed on such matters. Regardless of our view on Unforgiven at least we probably all agree that we’d be much the poorer if Mr. Eastwood were not making movies.
Personally, I think it is about as good as movie making gets. It leaves me exhilarated and uncomfortable every time I watch it.
In an industry of cardboard cut-out characters Unforgiven stands above because there is barely a superfluous performance or throwaway scene in there, everything counts, everything matters.
It was well filmed, well acted, well directed. And it made a glaring point usually left out of westerns that violence is stupid, ugly and pointless and engaged in by evil men leaving everyone devastated. People with guns are not heroes.
I’ll counter with a bent paper-clip, a used bubblegum wrapper and a dead fly.
Bolding mine. That may well be your personal belief and you interpreted what you saw on the screen as reinforcing that. What it seemed to me that Eastwood was trying to say was only that people and their actions are a mixture of good and bad. For example, Little Bill was a brutal sadist who took obvious enjoyment in beating English Bob nearly to death. He wasn’t a nice person, or good by many people’s standards. Yet having him as sheriff was a positive thing for the townspeople, as his sadistic behavior towards the English Bobs of the world allowed them to lead safer, more peaceful lives.
Eastwood might have had higher ambitions regarding his own character, but for all that we are supposed to believe that William Munny was essentially a hard, bad man, we never saw it. Eastwood played Munny as just one more western hero with a past. Marshal Dillon in the Gunsmoke radio show had essentially the same backstory. Nothing new at all there. We are told, repeatedly, about what a hard case Munny was, and the climax of the movie is supposed to show us that coming back out in him; but Munny is arguably one of the nicest, most sensitive guys in the movie. His little interlude with the whore is demonstrative of his character as a whole. Even his roaring rampage of revenge at the end is righteous. He kills the shit out of those people, not out of meanness or greed, but because they killed his friend and put the corpse on display.
Violence in the film is only good or bad as far as the motivations of the character engaging in it. That is hardly cutting edge script writing.
The Outlaw Josey Wales - pros - Chief Dan George, ‘Buzzards gotta eat, same as worms’, Ten Bears, and ‘A man like Wales is easy to track, he leaves a trail of dead men behind him wherever he goes.’
- cons - Sandra Locke, the main villain can’t hold a candle to Little Bill from Unforgiven.
Unforgiven - pros - Harris, Freeman, Hackman. ‘The Duck of Death’. ‘You just shot an unarmed man!’ "Well, he should have armed himself if he was gonna decorate his saloon with my friend.’ Hackman is a much better villain/bad guy than anything in OJW.
- cons - Not quite as quotable as OJW, and none of the supporting actors turned in as good of a performance as Chief Dan George imo.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - pros - Eli Wallach, the music, the epic scope, Eli Wallach, ‘There are two types of people in this world, those with guns, and those that dig. You dig.’, THE absolutest bestest ever showdown ever filmed, and Eli Wallach.
- cons - IMO none of the other characters can hold up in this Clint vs. Wallach grudge match, although that’s not necessarily a terrible thing.
So, after long thought and consideration, consultation with seers, astrologers, cowboys, and other various and sundry trail hands, the winner in the Best Eastwood Western is…
A Fistful of Dollars.
True, but I think Eastwood pushed this further. He was certainly making the point that it is hard to escape your nature, to be what you are not. The Schofield kid was no killer and nor was Ned. Little Bill played the amiable town guardian but underneath was…as you rightly say, a sadist. (and the little asides between his posse hint at the man he truly is) And sure enough his treatment of English Bob and the whores show it. The same is true for Munny, all the way through we have reflections on the man he was and claims no longer to be. But no, he is an evil SOB and keeping it in check for a few years was all he could manage.
Even English Bob, being driven away in the coach, beaten and bruised shouts back to the town and all his gentrified manner is gone. His accent changes and we see him for the common low-life he is and always was. Interesting I think that Bob’s sidekick is a writer of legends, lies and escapism.
No.
Except Munny still gets to have his orgy of violence against the bad (or worse) guys at the end, i.e. Eastwood gets to have his cake and eat it, too. But I think we’ve argued this here before.
I think it was pretty clear that the HPD was Marshal whoever.
Little Bill is the “good guy” in Unforgiven. He is just not a good man. He is a sadist. He beats Ned to death and nearly kills Bob because he likes beating people in unfair fights. His failure to bring the cowboys to justice for maiming the woman is what brings about his death, and the death of the cowboys and his deputies, who have done nothing wrong.
William Muny was a drunken sociopath. He left his small children to starve in hopes of getting some muny. He wasn’t drunk at the time he did that. He has trouble being his old killer self when not drunk, and Ned can’t do it at all anymore. But he does leave the children to chase the bounty. He takes Ned from his wife.
He and the Kid kill the unarmed guy taking a shit. When he finds out Ned is killed, which was likely all along, he gets drunk and goes on a suicide mission, fully intending to abandon his children if the Kid doesn’t look after them.
The guy is a nasty nihilistic shitheel.
Why would that lady’s daughter marry a known murderer and drunkard? Whom she reformed prior to dying.
See my comment above.
It was a good movie and that’s about it. Each to their own and all.
There’s a small line in Shane that says everything Unforgiven says about violence in about 5 seconds.
When the news of the gunman who has arrived in the town (Walter Jack Palance), the homesteaders all ask Shane if he knows him. Shane, of course, knows exactly who he is. Very tense and exciting until one of the homesteaders notes that there is nothing impressive about a gunfighter and that it’s just murder.
A very effective line in a classic movie.
In one form or another, but I still say it’s not as siimple as “the ghost of Jim Duncan.” There’s something more to it than that. As Clint himself said: “It’s just an allegory…a speculation on what happens when they go ahead and kill the sheriff and somebody comes back and calls the town’s conscience to bear. There’s always retribution for your deeds.”
It also gives us the awesome line, ‘he shoulda armed himself if he was gonna decorate his bar with my friend.’
Wow I have never interpreted the movie this way at all.
From my perspective there are no ‘good guys’ and no ‘bad guys’, if anything Will Munny is the good guy. He’s a man trying to do right by his kids. His late wife ‘cured’ him of his evil ways. His farm is going to hell; and the only way he can make it right is to collect on that bounty. He didn’t abandon his kids, he went in search of a better life for them. His kids didn’t even know he used to ‘shoot people’. I’m of the belief that in the late 1800s leaving your kids for a few days wasn’t as big of a deal as you’re making it out to be. The indication was that Will Munny’s evil killer self was always because he was drunk. The movie ending even goes on to say that he went on to prosper in dry goods or something like that. It was about survival. There are several indication throughout the movie that Munny sincerely regretted his past life. Wild Bill is the shitheel from step one (…but he’s no carpenter). It’s widely known that there was a gray line between good and bad in the old west. Many times ‘bad’ guys were sheriffs just because it brought in a paycheck, and they weren’t afraid to use a gun; but it had little to do with how good the guy was. Little Bill was a gutless coward who had to had behind situations where he had an unfair advantage.
Maybe I’m the weird one here (yeah, yeah … take those responses to another thread) but am I the only one who sees High Plains Drifter as just one in a series of five? Eastwood is the same character in each one.
Okay, so Leone was remaking Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (scene for scene) in Fist Full of Dollars and someone called him “Joe” for lack of a better handle, but Leone struck out on his own in A Few Dollars More and someone called the character “Monco” for some reason. The third from Leone brought back both van Cleef and Eastwood, with Wallach’s Tuco calling them “Angel Eyes” and “Blondie” respectively. And it’s clear that Blondie and Angel Eyes know each other from earlier encounters (e.g. the previous movie). In each of these, Eastwood’s character isn’t bothering to give his own name. When Eastwood took over the directing and did High Plains Drifter, The Stranger wasn’t even addressed directly, and in the last one he showed up as a Preacher (riding a Pale Horse, no less) whom LaHood ultimately recognizes as someone he already killed* and the other miners simply refer to Eastwood’s character as “Preacher” without worrying about his name.
The people of Lagos (or Stacey and his colleagues) and LaHood can’t have killed the same guy twice in two different towns, could they?
The Outlaw Josie Wales was good and I kinda wished there was a sequel (or that he just joined up with the other Rebs without sharing his name) but, when it’s said and done, I prefer the whole Man With No Name series over the Gone to Texas interpretation. Now if I could just find a day to watch all five in a row…
*Anyone else notice the shot pattern on LaHood was the same as the scar pattern on the Preacher?
–G!
Now the candy store’s closed,
the movie’s sold out
High Plains Drifter
isn’t what it’s all about
. --Jon Bongiovi
. More Than We Bargained For
. Power Station demo recordings
I think Unforgiven is very over-rated. It’s just about the only film on that list I don;t either own a copy of or will watch when I come across it. It’s just too damn dark… in more ways than one. Well done, yes. but not enjoyable to me.
He fully intended to die in the shoot-out with Little Bill and the deputies. Just the luck of the Unforgiven that only the good die young. He wasn’t even scratched. You don’t go alone to a shoot-out with a saloon full of armed lawmen and announce yourself before starting with just a shotgun and a six-shooter. He expected to die after shooting the barkeep and Little Bill. But the misfire was Little Bill’s bit of bad luck because Muny didn’t think when he was drunk, he just acted, threw the shotgun, slowing down Little Bill and confusing his deputies. Just dumb luck.
But he was always lucky when it came to killing folks.
For what it’s worth, the book does have a sequel.