Eastwood's triumph (Unforgiven (DVD))

Member Name: shaneo632

Product:	Unforgiven (DVD)
Date:	07/07/09 (3 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Superb themes and a revisonist rejection of the cliched western, great performances too

Disadvantages: Some argue it reverts back to these conventions in the final act

The revisionist Western is a term that eminated from films like Clint Eastwood's Oscar winning masterpiece Unforgiven, a film that usurps the conventions of the genre established by auteurs such as John Ford (The Searchers, Stagecoach, The Man who Shot Liberty Valance) and Howard Hawks (Red River).

In 1880, in the town of Big Whiskey, cowboy Quick Mike (David Mucci) slashes a prostitute's (Delilah Fitzgerald) (Anna Levine) face for laughing at his small penis. The abrasive local sherrif Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman), fines the cowboy, but the other prostitutes, led by their madam Strawberry Alice (Frances Fisher), are furious over the seemingly lax punishments and offer a $1000 reward to anyone who kills the two. Some ways away in Western Kansas, the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) approaches a farm owned by William Munny (Clint Eastwood), and asks him if he'd like to aid him in performing the hit. Munny is at first apprehensive, being long retired from a violent life of debauched crime, but considers his financial troubles, and then accepts, recruiting a former associate and neighbor, Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), to join them.

Unforgiven has recieved huge amounts of praise for rejecting the typical conventions of the genre - that is, caricature gunslingers that simply kill without any emotional or psychological plausibility. Instead, these are broken down characters that are long past the phase of arrested development that so many Western protagonists and antagonists seem to be stuck in - this is a film of overwhelming complexity that isn't free of violence, but when it appears, it is treated as incredibly destructive, and Eastwood is sure that his characters are forced to deal with the very real implications of taking a life.

Unforgiven is a slow-moving yet quietly curious revisionist Western, complete with an ambiguous moral relativism that complements the great cast and picturesque direction from Clint Eastwood.

Summary: A western brimming with psychology and tension