Best Picture: #65
Original Release Date: August 7, 1992
Rating: R
Runtime: 2 hours, 10 minutes
Director: Clint Eastwood
Quick Impressions:
Never in my life have I seen a film that inspired me to take action more than Unforgiven. What did it inspire me to do, you ask? Shoot that sheriff.
Despite my jokes about wanting to become a cannibal when I wrote about The Silence of the Lambs, I am not a particularly bloodthirsty person. In fact, I don’t even kill ants and spiders, and I try to be as gentle to plants as I can. I’m really a fan of letting living creatures remain unharmed. Nevertheless, if someone tried to humiliate me by handing me a gun and saying, “Shoot me,” to demonstrate that I wouldn’t do it, I would one-hundred percent shoot that person. I’d shoot him right in the face. Maybe not in the moment (maybe not) but definitely afterwards. (And probably in the moment.)
I don’t claim out of the ordinary prescience, but I promise you this, anyone who keeps going around daring people to shoot him is going to get shot. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but probably on the last day of his life.
All that said, by far my favorite character in this film is Gene Hackman’s sheriff, Little Bill. (I had forgotten that Hackman won Best Supporting Actor that year, but why he did is no mystery when you watch the performance.) I just couldn’t stop wanting to shoot the guy! And he’s just one of many extremely compelling characters in Unforgiven. The Schofield Kid (played by Jaimz Woolvett) consistently enraged me, too. (“It’s a good thing I didn’t live in the Old West,” I told my daughter. “I would have killed everybody!” Rolling her eyes, she scoffed at me, “You would have died of hog fever!”) (She thinks too well of me because I’m her mother. I would have died shooting the sheriff.) (Of course, to be fair, as I shot him, I would have been very concerned about catching hog fever. I am kind of a germaphobe.)
My murderous impulses aside, both my daughter and I loved all the characters in this film. The performances are great. (It’s no mystery why Clint Eastwood won Best Director, either.) And we get such an array of unusual and memorable people. Eastwood himself is Will Munny, a reluctant gunman (though not too reluctant; he’ll kill strangers for money after being asked just once by someone (clearly not of sound judgment) he’s never met before). Morgan Freeman is Ned Logan, his partner, pointedly only along on the journey out of concern for an old friend’s welfare. Gene Hackman is Little Bill (a sheriff whose ideas on maintaining order are almost solid, though his love of kicking people when they’re down is concerning). Richard Harris is English Bob a crack shot who at first seems like a delightful wildcard but is ultimately too afraid to die to be of much use in Big Whisky, Wyoming. Frances Fisher is Alice, a favorite of ours and also, presumably, of many paying customers who visit the local saloon/brothel. Is she stirring up trouble? Absolutely. But she gets results. (Are they good results? The movies over by then, so…) Jaimz Woolvett is the Schofield Kid, a young man even more eager to shoot people than I am…until it comes to pulling the trigger. Saul Rubinek is W.W. Beauchamp, the writer who disappoints me more and more and more. (Why won’t he shoot that sheriff? He’s perfectly positioned to do it! The sheriff thinks he’s incapable of it now!) Anna Thomson is Delilah, the woman who starts it all by having a face. (As my daughter pointed out many times, Delilah is really not allowed to do much else but stand around having a face. Sometimes that’s enough.) (Besides, when you’re a prostitute repeatedly encouraged by the saloon keeper to wear a veil so men will agree to sleep with you again, always standing around with your recently scarred face exposed makes quite a strong statement.)
For some reason, I thought I had seen Unforgiven, but I hadn’t. (I am completely sure, however, that I have seen all Best Picture winners going forward except Spotlight. I could probably prove it with ticket stubs if I could ever find anything.) As my daughter and I took in this story together, we kept being introduced to more and more fascinating people. I wish things had gone a bit differently in the end, but the film is highly engaging (and eventually enraging. That sheriff! I can’t believe he remains alive through so much of the movie!).
The Good:
Just to be emphatically clear, I’m quite unlikely to shoot anyone (except that sheriff) (just kidding). (In all seriousness, we’re watching Schindler’s List right now. Murder disgusts me.) But I do think Unforgiven does an excellent job of engendering in the viewer the sense that the sheriff must be (or at least will be) shot. If director Clint Eastwood and writer David Webb Peoples ever read this (which is unlikely) I’m sure they’ll be quite annoyed with me for watching their movie and aspiring to become a murderer when the film very clearly shows the grave moral and psychological ramifications of taking a life. But it was hard for me not to fixate on the sheriff because though I knew nothing else, I became surer and surer he had to go.
Beauchamp (the increasingly annoying writer) points out something late in the film that stuck in my mind. He thinks a gunman (worth anything) would shoot the strongest person in the room first. Now Beauchamp does not really come across as the world’s greatest writer. As my daughter said, “He just writes for the closest psychopath.” She’s correct. He wants to be a biographer of the world’s greatest gun slinger, but he seems to have no fixed idea of who that is. What Beauchamp says about gunmen (going for the strongest person in the room) is actually true about himself. He’s far too impressed by displays of strength and immediately attaches himself to the person he believes is the strongest one present. The movie shows us that his theories about gunmen are just that, theories. He’s looking for the perfect formula. Real life is not formulaic. Basically, he’s wrong about everything. He lacks practical experience. He’s kind of an idiot.
However, this idea of his about taking out the strongest person in the room first is interesting. (Where does Beauchamp get this notion? Does he steal it from Little Bill? I’ll have to watch again.) Beauchamp’s not good for much. But this particular idea is key to unlocking the movie. Unforgiven gives us so many characters, and they’re all so morally ambiguous and confused (confused themselves, I mean). Good luck finding a hero! But if you do want to find the hero, I’ll tell you how. First find the villain. I could not morally orient myself in this mess at all until I realized how much Little Bill needed to be shot. There are a lot of reasons he could be shot. He does a lot of stuff that might motivate somebody to shoot him. But (Little Bill’s kind of right here) most people don’t want to shoot him because taking a life is a big deal. So find the person who has a reason to shoot Little Bill, who doesn’t care about the moral consequences of shooting him. That’s the hero. To find the hero, you must first identify the villain. (Hint: It’s Little Bill.) No one in this film is virtuous. Forget virtue. Focus on vice; then everything falls into place so easily that the story does become almost formulaic. Nobody involved is a hero, but Little Bill’s actions mark him for death, so the story can’t end until his life is finished.
Realizing the crucial importance of Little Bill took me a while. At first, I got lost in all the intriguing characters the movie offers. What makes Unforgiven fascinating is its variety of characters, all moving in slightly unpredictable ways. Early on, I did not know for sure how exactly these lives would intersect and what would happen when they did. As I watched, I honestly wasn’t sure if the two men involved in cutting Delilah’s face would end up dead for their crime or not. (One of them is much guiltier, but none of the guns for hire heading to Big Whiskey know or care about that.) The other prostitutes are offering good money to anyone who kills these men, and all sorts of mercenary gunmen are popping up everywhere, eager to do the job. But I never knew for sure if any of them would succeed. To be completely honest, at a certain point, I stopped caring if they succeeded there and focused instead on the inevitability of somebody taking down the sheriff. That was the first thing in the movie that I sensed with any certainty. The sheriff had to die.
I probably thought I had seen Unforgiven because by 1992-93, I was intently watching the Oscars every year. So I’m sure I saw clips from awards shows and late night TV interviews. Plus my grandparents talked about the movie a lot. The narrative I remember from the 90s is that Unforgiven was so celebrated because of its atypical take on the Western, featuring more complex characters and moral ambiguity than Westerns had in the past. Instead of good guys vs. bad guys, we just get a bunch of guys with guns, trying their best to fumble through life. Watching in 2021, I didn’t find Unforgiven particularly unusual in that regard. These days, moral ambiguity is the hallmark of reality and fiction alike. But Unforgiven still stands out because of the number of complex, captivating characters it offers us. The Western, as a genre, lends itself to showcasing conflicted characters coming into conflict with one another because in the Old West, societal complication is at a minimum. It’s all kind of barebones in places like Big Whiskey. It’s all about land, water, cattle, obvious aggressions. There’s nothing else going on. And everybody’s got a gun. The complexity has to come from within the characters because the society is so simple, so pared down (barely there at all).
This movie has the most intriguing characters I’ve seen fumbling through a story in quite a long while. It helps that Oscar caliber actors play most of them. Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman, Richard Harris. I like the way the film introduces Little Bill, Will and friends, and English Bob separately and lets the audience get to know them while slowly bringing them together.
Little Bill is certainly the character in whom I was most emotionally invested. Usually when I want to kill somebody that much, I don’t simultaneously find the person so charming. Granted, he makes a bad impression in his first scene when his solution to a prostitute’s face being cut (to the point of disfigurement) is asking the men responsible to give the man who owns the saloon a bunch of horses to compensate for damaged property. (And it’s not like everyone is just okay with that. Another prostitute named Alice very vocally challenges Little Bill, so this isn’t just some oversight on his part.) Still (though he doesn’t seem like a great feminist) it’s not immediately clear that he’s a bad sheriff. He genuinely does seem to be trying to avoid unnecessary bloodshed in the community. For the longest time, Little Bill doesn’t come across as a villain at all. He’s (rather comically, ineptly) building his own house. He manages to disarm a dangerous, braggart gunfighter and tosses off a pretty funny line. (“Hell, even I thought I was dead…till I found out that it was just that I was in Nebraska.” I was born in Nebraska myself, and still have a lot of family there, including a cousin who fondly refers to our home town as Omahell.) Despite Little Bill’s initial callousness toward Delilah, I was vaguely on his side (or at least not 100 percent against him) for a pretty long time.
Then he starts repeatedly kicking an unarmed man in the face. I’m just not sure that’s necessary. I know he wants to dissuade other gunmen from coming to town (which does not work, by the way). But why can’t he just throw English Bob in jail without kicking him in the face repeatedly? Then the “here, take my gun and shoot me” business happens. (I’ll talk about that in more detail later.) After that little game, I knew the movie couldn’t end until somebody shot Little Bill. What a shame, though, because he has such charm in so many of his interactions. (I don’t care for his method of stealing English Bob’s biographer, but I will acknowledge that he’s the superior storyteller.) Any doubts remaining in our minds about Little Bill’s fate are dispelled by what happens with Ned. After that, we know Little Bill is marked for death. But in the moments that he’s not engaged in vicious, brutal acts, he never completely seems like a villain. In fact, his encounter with English Bob is morally confusing. It’s hard not to be suspicious of Bob (who does seem like a villain, albeit a somewhat delightful one), and as the confrontation between the two begins, Little Bill seems the more oriented toward justice of the two.
Harris’s English Bob may be my second favorite character in the film because of the way the story uses him. At first, he simply seems like a delightful bonus character, a wildcard, an unnecessary complication. (It’s hard not to wonder, “Why are we meeting this guy? We know Will Munny is on his way. We don’t need English Bob to shoot the guy who cut up Delilah.”) As we first meet him, we quickly see that English Bob is ornery, provocative, and theatrical, but ultimately not willing to risk much. He is very useful, however, for revealing to the audience precisely who the story’s villain is. Bob’s a troublemaker, and he comes into town looking like a bad guy, but by the time he leaves, we can see without any doubt whatsoever who’s the real bad guy in Big Whisky. I also like Bob because Richard Harris brings much more to the character than is strictly needed. When he left, I kept hoping he might come back one day. What a charged parting gaze!
The Schofield Kid drives me almost as crazy as the sheriff. The difference is, I don’t see him as being worth my time. (At one point, my daughter remarked, “I like the sheriff,” and I agreed, “Me, too! I want to kill him.” My daughter pointed out, “That’s kind of contradictory,” and I protested, “No, it shows I respect him. I find him worthy of risking my immortal soul. Also he annoys me, and I really feel he should be dead by now.”) The Kid is not worthy of risking anyone’s immortal soul. In the end, he lives because he’s not worth killing. I find his whole way of interacting with people extremely annoying. His initial routine is bearable, the whole, “Hello, I am definitely a murder. That’s for sure. I sure do love killing people all right. I have killed so many people—for real!—and I look forward to killing more. Please ignore the fact that I am unable to hit anything when I fire my gun!” But he just gets worse and worse as the movie goes on!
Okay, we can’t all be killers, and he’s useful as a catalyst, and I talk all the time, too, but…I just don’t understand why someone like Will Munny wants to work with this Kid. (At one point, Eastwood’s character says, “You don’t have to worry, Kid. I ain’t gonna kill you. You’re the only friend I got.” My daughter joked, “Even my horse hates me.” But I thought, “Oh my God! How sad!”) I could not last one day conspiring with the Schofield Kid!
My daughter praised Wolvett’s line delivery. She liked the way that although the Kid’s words are clearly lies, the actor’s delivery of the words reveals the truth about the Schofield Kid so plainly. (I honestly just can’t stand the character. If I went to go murder somebody, it wouldn’t be with him. I find it especially grating that he incites Will to commit murder, then pointedly tells him, “I’m not a murderer like you,” after he’s done it. My daughter pointed out, “He’s just scared.” He’s not too scared to take his cut of the money—which he did nothing to earn, incidentally. Of course, I guess from Will’s point of view, perhaps the Kid is the friend he deserves at this point, after the catastrophe he’s brought on his real friend. I guess spending a couple of hours in Big Whiskey quashed all of my charitable impulses. My daughter kept saying things like, “He’s annoying, but I like his character because you can tell he’s striving for approval. He clearly wants people to be his friend and think he’s cool. Were things not good at home?” She’s right, but I couldn’t help feeling like Eastwood’s character is trapped in some kind of purgatory situation as long as he’s stuck hanging around with The Scofield Kid. (But I think any character who provokes that degree of response from me is well written and acted.)
Will’s actual friend Ned (Morgan Freeman) seems like a pretty great guy on many levels, but what is he even doing there? (Speaking for him once, my daughter decided, “I’m only out here ’cause you seem sad, Will.”) Ned never wants to be there. He is extremely helpful to Will (on two separate occasions). Will could not complete his mission (of being the story’s reluctant hero) without him. But it’s hard to see what Ned gets out of the whole ordeal. Morgan Freeman is always a welcome presence in a movie. If he weren’t along, the Will Munny/Schofield Kid part of the story would be almost unbearable to watch for me.
Skinny, the saloon keeper who essentially owns the prostitutes, held my attention every time he was on screen, too, probably because he’s played by Anthony James who made such an impression on us listening to “Foul Owl on the Prowl” in In the Heat of the Night.
Unforgiven also features some gorgeous shots of traveling across remote lands. And I find the love story compelling and unusual, too. Will Munny loved his wife while she was alive. Now she’s dead, and he still loves her. When she was alive, he tried to change for her and always fell short. Now she’s dead, and he still falls short. The end.
Best Scene:
You’ll never guess, but my favorite scene is the one in which the sheriff (Little Bill) hands the writer (W.W. Beauchamp) a gun and tells him to shoot him. He’s trying to illustrate that it’s not easy to kill a man. Well, that’s what he says he’s trying to illustrate. It seems pretty clear to me that this game of his has a triple purpose. 1) He’s trying to humiliate and goad English Bob (standing there behind bars) as much as he possibly can. (He’s already had the pleasure of kicking him in the face in the dirt. But that’s not enough. He wants to dismantle the myth Bob is carefully constructing of himself. He wants to shame Bob in front of the writer, and to demonstrate his dominance in the scene (to Bob). 2) He’s trying to humiliate and impress the writer simultaneously. He wants to steal that writer by winning his loyalty, and (again) to demonstrate his dominance (to the writer). 3) He’s a sadist, and he enjoys tormenting the writer (and Bob).
That’s why Little Bill pulls that nonsense with the gun from the character’s point of view. Clearly there’s another purpose for the scene, to show the audience (like me) that in the end, Little Bill must be shot. From that moment on, we expect Little Bill to be shot at some point in the future. We know the story won’t be over until he is. (I had fun with this because so many people could shoot him. Eastwood’s character seems like the obvious choice, but he has some gun problems sometimes.) Until this scene, I had no idea what it would take to end the movie. We know, of course, all the gunmen and the prostitutes hope that the men responsible for the movie’s initial crime will be killed, but there’s no guarantee that will happen. This scene all but guarantees to the audience that Little Bill will be shot. He must be shot. The movie will not end until he is shot. (At least, that’s the way I took it.)
Watching Little Bill hand the writer the gun, I exploded in a continuous stream of agitation, “What the…? What is he doing? I can’t tell if this sheriff is smart or stupid! I see his point, but how does he know this writer isn’t a killer? If I were Bob, I’d be hoping he doesn’t do it. This is very frightening. I would kill myself If I were this writer. I would shoot myself.” After manifesting so much anxiety, I surprised my daughter by declaring, “This is my favorite scene.”
The writer is put into an unenviable position, but it’s hard not to be stunned by the sheriff’s overconfidence. He thinks he can tell for sure that the writer doesn’t have what it takes to pull the trigger. (Why? Just because he wet his pants?) What if he’s wrong? He just met this writer! How can Little Bill possibly be so sure? This is an unnecessary risk, and it reveals Little Bill’s Achilles Heel. From his first scene on, we see more and more character flaws in Little Bill. But handing the writer the gun illustrates more than a character flaw. This is a weakness, a vulnerability. Little Bill simply cannot resist displays of dangerous overconfidence.
You’ll notice I didn’t get the idea to shoot the sheriff until after the tense moment was over. In the moment, I felt stress and pitied the writer. Shooting the sheriff is a scary idea, and even this addled writer has brains enough to know Little Bill handing him the gun must be a trick. Passing the gun through the bars to English Bob can’t be a good option either (for Bob and the writer), or Little Bill wouldn’t have given the writer the gun. I felt the writer’s torment in the moment.
But once the moment had ended, I was angry on the writer’s behalf. Someone who uses a position of power to psychologically torture the weak is not a good sheriff. (Little Bill doesn’t come across as a particularly great sheriff as he’s repeatedly kicking English Bob while he’s down, either. But at least he has a reason for making a point there. He has to dissuade other gunmen from coming to town looking to collect. And clearly he and Bob have a history.)
For the rest of the movie, I secretly hoped that Beauchamp might be the one to shoot Little Bill. After all, once you’ve proven to someone that you will not shoot him, that you don’t have it in you, he’s much more likely to let his guard down around you. The writer could have killed the sheriff at so many points. Little Bill would never have been expecting it! Another good candidate for shooting Little Bill was Delilah, the prostitute whose face has been cut. If neither of them shot the sheriff, I was fully willing to jump through the TV screen and kill him myself.
Best Scene Visually:
This is probably not the best scene visually, but I absolutely love the moment when Will Munny first tries to mount his horse and just can’t. It goes on for so long. He just goes around and around in circles. It becomes borderline ridiculous. “And that’s how the merry-go-round was invented,” I joked to my daughter as we watched.
As an avenger of the wronged, Will doesn’t look too promising in this moment, though it did give me hope that maybe I could one day ride a horse. The generally disconcerting state of the Munny household—where hog after hog seems to get the fever—made me immediately sympathetic to Eastwood’s character. “Pa, two more hogs got the fever,” Munny’s little girl piped up, and I said to my daughter, “This reminds me of our house.” In fact, Munny’s whole attitude, “In the past I was irredeemably horrible, but…now I’m basically headed in that direction again,” seemed all too relatable to me as I watched. (I criticized Munny earlier for taking money to kill, but honestly, he’s at least partially motivated by idea that someone has mutilated a defenseless woman. And as long as he’s already mired in guilt because of past wrongdoings, his kids do have to eat.)
I sort of like the movie’s suggestion that Munny can’t do much of anything until there’s something to do. He seems quite muddled in the beginning, but Little Bill’s provocations really help him focus.
Both my daughter and I also enjoyed the sunsets that bookend the story, too, but of greater interest to me is the rain.
“That the sheriff controls everything,” my daughter said to me just now, “the town. The people in the town. The laws. Who can enter. Who can leave. It’s Little Bill’s choices that matter.”
“Little Bill even builds his own house,” I pointed out, adding with a grin, “but he cannot stop the rain from coming in. Will Munny is an act of God, like the rain. If you’ll notice, it’s raining on the night Little Bill is shot, too.”
I also enjoyed the scene between Munny and Delilah, showcasing their reactions to one another. Both face the camera, so they can’t see one another’s faces. But we get to see them. And this is definitely the most significant conversation Delilah has in the film.
Best Action Sequence:
Probably my favorite action sequence is English Bob getting kicked in the face. I loved how quickly my sympathies shifted from Little Bill to English Bob. It was very uncomfortable. I thought, “Yes, Bob is a bad man. But after Little Bill demonstrates that he could be by far the better man, he goes on to show us that he is actually the worst man of all. ” It’s a great scene.
I also like the two scenes in which the face cutters meet their ends. Both scenes let the characters and the audience reflect on what it means to kill someone. (It can’t be very hard to kill someone who mocks people when they offer to protect him while he’s using the outhouse. Surely a person is at their most vulnerable then. I don’t understand why he reacts to their offers to stand guard with such scorn.)
The Negatives:
To me, the ending of the movie is so predictable. “Anticlimactic” was the word my daughter used, and I agree with her. It’s slightly disappointing. Of all the ways the movie could have ended, this one was the easiest to anticipate (eventually). When a certain key event happens, (when a certain character disappears from the story), what will follow becomes obvious.
Emotionally, I was disappointed by this development. For a film that seems to be trying to separate itself from other Westerns, this seems like a pretty generic move, after all. I guess the difference between Unforgiven and more traditional Westerns is that we’re not allowed to feel celebratory about the death of a certain figure (although I did.) (I don’t think I’m avoiding spoilers very successfully, but this film came out in 1992. It’s the sheriff. I’m talking about the sheriff. After reading this far, surely you won’t be shocked to learn that he gets shot.)
I would have been so much happier if someone else—anyone else—had shot Little Bill. (Well not just anyone else. I hoped it might be Beauchamp (the otherwise useless writer) or Delilah (honestly, the best person for the job). But I realize that Unforgiven is not going for a shocking twist ending. (Wouldn’t it have been a surprise if English Bob had returned to town, though?)
All those possibilities opened up by the beginning of the story—so many characters pointed in different directions!—and then the film closes them off and ends in the most predictable way it can.
I guess Will Munny has to do something. He’s there. But Little Bill is the one who gives some meaning to Will’s activities. This wouldn’t be a satisfying story without the villain. I know (or imagine) that part of the point of this movie is that there are no heroes, but I think it shows somewhat more effectively that villains create heroes.
My daughter and I differ a bit in our assessment of Clint Eastwood’s character and performance. I see nothing wrong with his acting (whereas she sees everything wrong with it), and I find his character sympathetic (or at least familiar. His baffling ineptitude at skills he’s supposed to have mastered reminds me of how I often behave when not focused by any sense of pressing urgency).
My daughter just noted, “I find Will’s character so boring. The way the movie tries to make him so complex! He’s the simplest ‘complex’ character I’ve ever seen. He doesn’t like to hurt people, and then the sheriff does. And in the end, they end up being the hero and the villain. Will Munny is not complex. He’s just a normal person. Normal people don’t like to harm people, and they’re sad when their wife dies. The sheriff is not normal. He likes to hurt people. That’s why he’s the bad guy. There is nothing unique or complex about Will Munny. We know all there is to him, and it’s all on the surface. He’s just not as evil as the sheriff. Will’s character seems to have been written to be more complex, but he isn’t. I just don’t like Will Munny’s character in the slightest. He’s so disappointing because he could be so much more. If you set out just trying to write a tortured hero, not trying to write a realistic person, you’re going to end up with a very basic character. Rather than trying to write your hero, you’re trying to write your hero into this stereotype.”
“I think the film sets out to show that there are no heroes and villains,” I said, “but instead, ends up creating an entire story defined by the villain.”
“He’s the protagonist, isn’t he?” my daughter realized, her eyes lighting up, “The sheriff?”
“Yes, that might be true,” I replied. “Without Little Bill, there’s no story. And once he’s dead, the story’s over.”
“He has the power to control the town,” she observed, “and the power to control the story. That’s a better way to think about the movie because now I don’t hate it as much.”
“Forget heroes and villains,” I agreed. “That sheriff is the character the movie is built around.”
“Honestly,” I said to her just now, “the problem that kicks off the story isn’t that Delilah’s face is cut. It’s that Little Bill does not adequately punish the men who did it. If he had severely whipped or killed those men, then that would have been the end of the story. The movie would have ended right after the opening scene.”
The women’s role in the story is a bit disappointing, too. Early on, Alice (Frances Fisher), who insists on justice for Delilah seems like the only person in Big Whiskey worth knowing. Sadly, her character quickly becomes reduced to her mere functionality. (She collects money to offer to gunfighters, to lure them there to kill the men who cut Delilah.) In fact, all of the prostitutes very quickly get reduced to serving the story in this way. All they do is summon the gunfighters, sleep with the gunfighters, hide the gunfighters, heal the gunfighters, pay the gunfighters, relay news to the gunfighters. The women only do things. Meanwhile the men wander around being people. It’s a bit disappointing that the women are there only to advance the plot and serve the story’s needs, reduced to pure functionality. It’s especially disappointing because they are prostitutes, and the movie reduces them to useful bodies, too. The film wastes an opportunity to develop them as individuals. Alice is one of the most interesting characters in the first scene (the first scene after the opening sunset). Too bad she fades from the story so quickly.
Overall:
I liked Unforgiven, although I found the last act slightly disappointing, only because the movie opens with such fascinating characters and limitless possibilities. Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, Richard Harris, and especially Gene Hackman give memorable performances. It’s a film I wouldn’t mind seeing again.