From: "eric walker" <eric.walker@channel1.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.movies
Subject: unforgiven (2 of 3)
Date: 15 Aug 92 20:33:41 EST
Reply-To: "eric walker" <eric.walker@channel1.com>
Distribution: rec
Organization: Channel 1 Communications

          This story deliberately takes every Western cliche and turns it
     on its side.  Notice the way the movie pokes fun at the classic scenes
     of target practice, where the gunfighter shoots at a can sitting on a
     log; or the ease with which the gunfighter can mount his horse and be
     off in a matter of microseconds; or the way a man can fall from his
     horse and suffer only a few scratches.  Sometimes the revisions are so
     deliberate that they stand out from the rest of the movie, as in one
     scene where Eastwood reaches behind a bar to get a bottle of whiskey
     to smash his attacker's face; but this never detracts from the story
     as a whole.  Every scene, every line has its purpose.
          But despite these little in-jokes, Eastwood achieves far more
     than a mere parody of the Western.  All of the characters in
     "Unforgiven" are richly developed, with their own sets of morals
     and their own ideals of right and wrong.  The entire movie is
     set in the grey area of morals, so that we don't really know
     who is right and who is wrong.
          The story begins when two cowboys participate in the shame of
     a prostitute, slashing her face so that she can no longer work.  Her
     fellow ladies are outraged at the way her plight is heartlessly
     treated by the Sherriff, and so they offer a $1,000 reward to the
     people who can come into town and kill the two men.  But it's not as
     simple as that.  The question is raised: is the scarring of a woman
     worth the lives of two men?  She was cruelly treated and the men
     deserved to be punished, but is killing them the right answer?  In
     fact, when one of the two men tries to make amends above and beyond
     the payment he is forced to give (he tries to give the woman his best
     pony), his gesture of apology is literally thrown back into his face.
          The morals question is also reflected in the Sherriff, Little
     Bill Daggett (played to perfection by Gene Hackman).  He knows that
     in a frontier town such as this one (its name is "Big Whiskey"),
     he must rule with an iron hand - and he honestly believes that he is
     keeping law and order in town.  He enforces a code that requires all
     visitors to the town to turn their guns over to him - a rule that
     he hopes will keep any bounty hunters from trying to claim the
     reward.  We see how he enacts his "justice" on one such hopeful,
     a gentlemanly chap named English Bob who turns out to be no gentleman.
     He beats and kicks Bob almost to death - but he does so as a warning
     to other potential trouble-makers.  In the harsh times of the Western
     frontier, his cruel way of sending this "message" may actually be
     justified, because he's doing it to a would-be murderer who wants
     to kill a person he is sworn to protect.
          In a similar fashion, Little Bill takes time out to explain the
     lack of morality on the Frontier to a travelling writer, W.W.
     Beauchamp.  This man was formerly English Bob's companion, but he
     decides to hang around Little Bill because Bill wants to tell him "the
     truth" as opposed to Bob's wild stories.  In "Unforgiven," W.W.
     actually represents us, the viewing audience.  For many a year, we've
     seen Westerns that portray the Wild Wild West as a fantasy land of
     justice and morals, where the Good Guys play fair and the Bad Guys
     always win in the end.  W.W. is writing a silly book that romanticizes
     English Bill's exploits, describing them in a fashion that we've
     heard in the classic Westerns.  But Little Bill tells W.W. what
     it's "really" like to be a gunfighter, and he blasts the myth of
     the Old West to pieces.  As W.W. learns what a harsh and dangerous
     place the West can be, so to do we ourselves learn that there is no
     true "Right" and "Wrong" in the realistic world of the new Hollywood
     Western.

     (Continued in next message.)
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