Unforgiven

UK Release Date. 18 September 1992
Certification. 15
Running Time. 2 hours 10 mins
Director. Clint Eastwood
Cast. Clint Eastwood, Frances Fisher, Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman, Richard Harris, Saul Rubinek, Anna Thomson, Jaimz Woolvett.
Rating. 78%

Review.

Clint Eastwood’s 1992 multiple award-winning Unforgiven may just be the veteran actor-turned-director’s most profound work. Eastwood’s eulogy to the genre is high on moral ambiguity and dispels many of the myths associated with the Old West.  

David Webb Peoples' eloquent and elegantly constructed screenplay tells a tale of revenge and redemption. Dark and gripping, and embracing complex themes, Eastwood plays the weather-beaten William Munny, a one-time killer reformed by the love of a good woman. 

Struggling to raise two young children on a failing farm, a young cowboy rides in with the promise of bounty for the vengeance slaying of two cowboys who mutilated a prostitute - an offer which Munny accepts with obvious misgivings. Nonetheless, Munny, the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) and Munny's long-time partner, Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), head off to Big Whiskey, Wyoming. The town's sheriff, Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman), appears somewhat indifferent to the women’s demands for justice, but is all too aware that the offer of a bounty will attract a horde of unsavoury characters to Big Whiskey; not all will be as dandy as English Bob (Richard Harris), the flamboyant hired killer, complete with his own sycophantic biographer in tow, V. W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek).

Like Gary Cooper in Anthony Mann’s Man Of The West, Munny finds himself dragged back into a world he has foresworn. Munny’s pious utterances, his insistence that “I ain’t like that any more,” and his professed loss of appetite for killing never really ring true. When he is eventually roused to blood rage, the result is precisely what we've been waiting for with inappropriate anticipation, with Munny becoming an amalgam of all the violent avenging riders from the Clint Eastwood back catalogue.

Unforgiven is a fine piece of craftsmanship, as you would expect of Eastwood. A magisterial film of great moral complexity, superbly acted by a large cast, with Hackman, Freeman and Eastwood's performances standing out in particular. There is no epic confrontation in Unforgiven between good and evil; the meaning of right and wrong meanders as the tale unfolds. The revisionist approach questions the notion of heroism. Three separate characters each deliver the line, “He had it coming," before William Munny provides the haunting pay-off, “We all got it coming, kid.”