Unforgiven (1992)

Unforgiven, the winner for Best Picture of 1992, is one of my favorite Westerns of all time. It's an amazing film with some of the best dialogue ever written. And it features one of the greatest of Clint Eastwood's performances; he was never better than he is in Unforgiven. I realize that this is a revisionist Western, but it uses the symbolism of earlier films so astutely and so thoughtfully that even fans of the classical form of the genre will admire it.

Eastwood plays William Munny, a "retired" gunfighter who has been reformed by his wife (now dead) and who lives a rather unsuccessful life as a pig farmer. He hears of a reward for the deaths of two men who are responsible for cutting the face of a prostitute in Big Whiskey, a reward offered by her fellow prostitutes, and soon joins the Scholfield Kid, an untested gunfighter, and Munny's partner from his past, Ned Logan. Ned is played by Morgan Freeman, and he gives another of his exceptional performances here. He is, at turns, funny and serious and cunning and deceitful.

As soon as the three men arrive in Big Whiskey, however, they are confronted by Sheriff "Little Bill" Daggett, a brute of a man who uses his deputies to inflict pain and terror. (Daggett is played with glee by the great Gene Hackman.) They have a rule requiring everyone to surrender any firearms upon entering the city, and that frequently causes problems for people who are attempting to collect the reward money. Munny and his friends, though, are a bit too stubborn to leave quickly, resulting in several encounters with Daggett's men. You know there's going to be at least one shootout--it is a Western, after all--but how the final confrontation plays itself out is a masterful sequence.

This is certainly a violent film at times, but all of the violent acts have a context. They have meaning. Munny is also no heartless killer. He struggles throughout the film with the competing desires of living up to his dead wife's wishes and his own desire for money to help with his children's future. It's no simple-minded, formulaic approach that the screenwriter, David Webb Peoples, has taken here. Eastwood serves as director as well as star, and this film demonstrates the maturity of his vision as a filmmaker. He has directed numerous great movies over the past several decades, but his achievement in Unforgiven still stands as the high mark of his career, in my opinion.

I've mentioned the dialogue, and I want to give just two brief examples. After the Scholfield Kid kills a man for the first time, Munny tells him, "It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he's got and all he's ever going to have." Those are my favorite lines in the film, actually. Earlier, after spending some time with the scarred woman who is the central figure in all of this action, Munny tells her after initially rejecting her sexual offers, "You ain't ugly like me. It's just that we both have got scars." Simple dialogue, really, but when you watch those lines spoken in the context of their scenes, they are intensely powerful.