Unforgiven

Every once in a while, Hollywood burps out a film that gives new life to a tired old plot. Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992) is such a movie. Its familiar narrative – a retired gunslinger reluctantly takes on one last job – has been injected with noirish ambiguity and atmosphere like no western before it.

The film's opening image of Eastwood standing at the grave of his dead wife (an allusion to John Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon) perfectly articulates the movie’s gritty and realistic attitude towards violence and its heartbreaking consequences. The muscular cinematography and brilliant sound design complement the narrative which unfolds like Greek tragedy. Every frame of this elegiac film breathes maturity, not only for the actor/director Eastwood, but also for the Western genre.

Clint Eastwood made a name for himself in Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns as the cigar-chomping Man with No Name, an anonymous stranger who wanders in to town and imparts his own brand of justice. Eastwood’s character in Unforgiven seems to be a man struggling to escape his past identity as the Man With No Name. The normally affable Gene Hackman plays the villain, a masochistic sheriff. Hackman has not brought this much intensity to the screen since his turn as Popeye Doyle in The French Connection. Morgan Freeman and Richard Harris are passable in the supporting roles, but their characters lack development.

Less of an "acid western" and more of a revisionist western, Unforgiven is a morally complex melodrama that subverts the usual mythology of the western genre. Eastwood casts a cold objective eye on the realities of the Old West after the gunsmoke from decades worth of Hollywood westerns has cleared. Violence is seen as both awful and unavoidable. The film shatters the clear-cut notions of heroism and villainy ingrained in almost every Hollywood movie; there’s good and bad evident in the best and the worst of the characters.

Few other filmmakers could have crafted such an intricate masterwork on the meanings of redemption and retribution so beautifully. The film won four Acadmy Awards, and was on the American Film Institute's list of top 100 films from cinema's first 100 years.