With all the fine westerns that have come out in the history of film, Unforgiven is only the third one to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Following in the steps of Cimarron and Dances With Wolves, Unforgiven finally got Clint Eastwood the Oscar recognition for one of film's great icons.
It's also one nasty and uncompromising look at the old west with people neither all good or all bad, usually reacting to the time and circumstances they're in. And the reputations they've had built for them by the various dime novelists whose work littered the land during the last half of the 19th century.
A former border raider back in the wild days of the Civil War, Clint Eastwood's William Munny is our protagonist. He gave all that up and got married, fathered two kids and has been living peaceful and quiet as a farmer. He's also given up the drink, because it was demon rum which helped him overcome a whole lot of inhibitions about violence.
But a few states over, a cowboy being told about his shortcomings from one of the town tarts, decided to cut her up. After doing so, he fled to the safety of the ranch he works for. Town Marshal Gene Hackman, also a violent man in the past tries to play the whole thing down. But the women raise a bounty in the only way they know how to take vengeance on behalf of a colleague. One of the great examples of women's liberation in the old west.
News of it is carried to Eastwood by old friend Morgan Freeman. Reluctantly because he does need the money, Eastwood, Freeman and young gun Jaimz Woolvett decide to go after it.
Gene Hackman won his second Oscar to go with his one for Best Actor in The French Connection. His town marshal is another uncommonly vicious man who now that he is on the side of 'law and order' has some grand pretensions about himself. It's also a fascinating look inside the character of someone like Wild Bill Hickok or Wyatt Earp and what it probably took to keep 'law and order' in frontier towns. It was a well earned Best Supporting Actor performance.
Part of the reason some folks in frontier America have the legendary reputations they do is the fact of those dime novels I mentioned before. Ned Buntline, the leading purveyor of this literature made the reputations that so many frontier icons have today. One of the most interesting roles in the film is that of Saul Rubinek who is such a novelist.
When we first meet Rubinek he's traveling with English Bob, played by Richard Harris in another fine performance. Hackman who knows of him and knows he killed a friend of his way back when, takes it on himself to expose and thoroughly humiliate Harris. He then takes on Rubinek as his scribe because he fancies the kind of reputation that Earp, Hickok, and Bill Cody et al are now enjoying.
Of course in the end when Clint delivers a bloody reprisal to one and all, Rubinek who now has seen such a scene of death and destruction that is having a lot of second thoughts about his profession. It's my favorite role in Unforgiven.
Unforgiven in addition to Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor for Hackman got Clint Eastwood his first Oscar in the Best Director category. He's won two of them now also for Million Dollar Baby. He was up in the Best Actor category, but lost to Al Pacino for Scent Of Mystery. Unforgiven won its fourth Oscar in the Editing category.
Unforgiven isn't John Wayne's kind of west, but it's a fitting climax for Clint Eastwood in the genre that launched his career. I don't think it's an accident he's not done another.
