![]() Richard Harris plays English Bob, a famous gunfighter who now lives off his publicity and is followed everywhere by W. Here his models are the Western masters like John Ford, who populated their movies with communities. The screenwriter, David Webb Peoples, ignores the recent tradition in which the expensive star dominates every scene, and creates a rich gallery of supporting roles. This process takes place against a full sense of the town's life. And eventually we see the younger William Munny emerging from his shell of age: He turns again into a fearsome man. The story becomes less about the bounty than about their personal, mutual, need for settlement, made all the sharper because they have met in the past. The story then works itself out in classic Western terms, with the corrupt sheriff and the righteous outlaw facing each other. He enforces it with fearful, sadistic beatings, and then returns to the riverside where he is building himself a house. His law says: No guns inside the city limits. This progression is intercut with life in Big Whiskey, Wyo., where Sheriff Little Bill Daggett ( Gene Hackman) rules with an iron fist. ![]() They will catch up with the Kid and share the bounty. Munny initially turns down the Kid's offer, but reflects on it, and eventually rides off to recruit an old partner, Ned Logan ( Morgan Freeman). "Before I met your dear departed Ma, I used to be weak and given to mistreatin' animals.") ("This old horse is getting even with me for the sins of my youth," he tells his children. When William Munny prepares to saddle up, he finds to his humiliation that he can hardly mount a horse anymore. The Kid is blind as a bat, and can't hit anything with his trademark revolver. But a running theme of the movie is the incompetence of the bounty hunters. He tells William Munny the story of two drunken cowboys who savagely attacked a prostitute in Wyoming: "They cut up her face, cut her eyes out, cut her ears off, hell, they even cut her teats. Now they create their own monikers, almost as marketing tools. In an earlier day men were nicknamed by others. The Schofield Kid has named himself, he says, after his Schofield model Smith & Wesson revolver. When he talks about his wife, Munny sounds like a contrite little boy, determined not to be bad anymore. Thus "Unforgiven" internalizes the classic Western theme in which violent men are "civilized" by schoolmarms, preachers and judges. William Munny is a chastened man, a killer and outlaw who was civilized by marriage. My wife, she cured me of that, cured me of drink and wickedness." It was whiskey done it as much as anythin' else. The Kid had heard that Munny was "cold as snow and don't have no weak nerve, nor fear." Munny says, "I ain't like that anymore, Kid. ![]() A rider named the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) appears with an offer of cash money for bounty hunting. He has two young children to raise after the death of his beloved Claudia. At one point he chases a hog, lands face down in the mud, and stays there for a moment, defeated. William Munny is not much of a hog farmer. Living indoors in a civilized style has made these people distinct. The daytime interiors, on the other hand, are always strongly backlit, the bright sun pouring in through windows so that the figures inside are dark and sometimes hard to see. Many of the film's exteriors are widescreen compositions showing the vastness of the land. The sun is setting, on this man and the era he represents. The opening shot is of a house, a tree, and a man at a graveside. The film reflects a passing era even in its visual style. If the Western was not dead, it was dying audiences preferred science fiction and special effects. Leone had died in 1989 and Siegel in 1991 he dedicated "Unforgiven" to them. Now Eastwood was in his 60s, and had long been a director himself. ![]() He began as a young gunslinger on TV and in the early Sergio Leone films "A Fistful of Dollars" and " For a Few Dollars More," and he matured in " Coogan's Bluff" and " Two Mules for Sister Sara," under the guidance of Don Siegel, the director he often cited as his mentor. Eastwood chose this period for "Unforgiven," I suspect, because it mirrored his own stage in life.
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