#21 Unforgiven - clearly no good guys lived in the old west

1992. dir. Clint Eastwood, starring Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman.

Seen it before? No.

This is going to be painful...I jammed my right pinky finger and so I'm wearing a brace.

Sam said there are five Clint Eastwood movies on our list that we must get through. I feel like I've been watching a lot of Clint Eastwood flicks lately. We watched Gran Torino before we started this project, (and yes, I am fully aware that we're going to be watching it again toward the end of this blog project) and Bridges of Madison Country has been playing on television lately. And now we just finished Unforgiven.

I was kind of confused by the very beginning. The first shot after the introduction was of a man and a prostitute having sex that was interrupted by a woman screaming and a guy slashing her with a knife. The guy with the knife tells the guy who was having sex to hold the girl while he cut her but it was dark so I thought the sex guy was actually holding the knife guy off. Then Little Bill (Hackman), the sheriff gets called into the brothel and he has to deal with both the guys being tied up for knifing the girl. With two "bad guys" and one "good guy" you would think that justice would be served...but of course, it isn't. So the women do what they think they need to in order to preserve themselves, pool together money to hire a hitman to kill the two jerks who cut their friend. Sounds like a good idea, in theory.

The kid who accepts the bounty was SO clearly wet behind the ears. He gets Eastwood and unintentionally Freeman to help him out. Somehow Richard Harris is in there, though I'll be honest, I didn't recognize him at all (must be because the last thing I saw him in before this was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Daphne's fiancee Donnie was in there too as a biographer.

Would I see it again? Probably one more time sometime in the future to see what I missed.
Would I add it to my collection? No, too violent for me, yes, I know, that's a funny thing to say since I like the Bourne and Kill Bill movies.

#21 Unforgiven: A man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition

1992. dir. Clint Eastwood, starring Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman.

Seen it before? No.

Deserve's got nothin' to do with it. --William Munny

The first of many Westerns on the list... this one is of the more recent "revisionist" vintage that attempts to be more realistic in its depiction of the old West. Clint Eastwood plays William Munny, who is a retired assassin and widower. He is attempting to raise livestock and is apparently not too successful at it. Meanwhile in a nearby town, there is an incident in which two traveling cowboys knife a prostitute's face. The sheriff, Little Bill (Gene Hackman), lets them off with a fairly light punishment, so the other prostitutes pool their money to hire somebody to kill them.

Much is made in this movie of the difficulty of killing. As opposed to a lot of the older cowboy movies, the characters in this movie actually have moral issues with it. The prostitutes seem to regret their decision, and all of the bloodshed that comes as a result. It's all very morally ambiguous, and there's no clear "good guy" in this movie. (Except maybe Morgan Freeman, but not really.) Clint Eastwood's character in particular is very anti-heroic.

I think a key character is the pulp novelist played by Saul Rubinek (Hey! It's Daphne's fiancee from Frasier!) He's introduced as the "biographer" of English Bob (Richard Harris) who had been telling him a lot of outlandish tales that he would then publish as "true stories". You see how the myth of the Wild West came to be created, and the movie does a good job desconstructing it.

This is a really well-made, tense, dramatic movie, and I really don't have anything snarky to say about it.

Position on the list: 108
OK, I lied, here's one: The ending is pretty friggin' ridiculous. I won't ruin it, but it's exactly the sort of bullshit unrealistic thing that would happen in one of those pulp novels.