Unforgiven

Plot synopsis:
William Munny (Clint Eastwood) is a widower with two young children. He was once a very vicious gunfighter, but after marrying, gave up gunfighting, drinking, and most other vices. His wife died of smallpox in 1878, but he continues to try to eke out a living with his children on their hog farm, and to try to be the kind of man he believes his late wife would want him to be. It is now 1880.The town of Big Whiskey, Wyoming is ruled rather arbitrarily by a sheriff named Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman). Two cowboys, Davey (Rob Campbell) and Mike (David Mucci) are spending their leave at a brothel owned by Skinny Dubois (Anthony James). One of the women, Delilah, makes an offhanded comment that Mike perceives as an insult, so he attacks her with a knife, scarring her face. Skinny and the de facto madam, Strawberry Alice (Frances Fisher) hold them until Little Bill can arrive. The women want Davey and Mike to hang, but Little Bill decides that since they did not murder Delilah, they should be horse-whipped instead. However, Skinny is more concerned with potential loss of business due to Delilah's disfigurement. So Little Bill decrees that instead of being horsewhipped, the men will have to give Skinny some horses. This outrages the women even more, and afterward they meet privately and pool all their resources to offer a reward to anyone who will kill the two attackers.We meet Munny on his farm trying to deal with some sick hogs. It quickly becomes clear that he is not a very good hog farmer, as he repeatedly falls in the mud when trying to grab a hog. In the midst of this he has a visitor, a young man calling himself the Scofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett), who knows Munny by reputation and would like his help in killing Davey and Mike in return for half the reward money. Munny makes it clear that he is not interested because, since marrying his late wife, he doesn't do the things he used to do anymore. But after the Kid leaves, Munny goes back to his bumbling attempts at tending hogs, and begins to have second thoughts. He sets a can on a tree stump and begins firing at it with his pistol, without hitting it. Finally he goes in the house and gets his rifle, and blows the can away on the first shot.Back in Big Whiskey, Davey and Mike show up with the horses for Skinny. The women throw stones and horse manure at them. Mike has never shown any remorse at any point, but Davey seems genuinely sorry about what happened to Delilah. He pointedly tells Skinny that one of the horses is not for him, and then offers it to Delilah. The women only throw more manure.Realizing that he will need help in the tracking down the wayward cowboys, Munny decides to contact his former partner, Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman). He says goodbye to his kids, telling them if they need anything to see Ned's common law wife, Sally Two Trees. After several bumbling and unsuccessful attempts to mount his horse, he finally mounts successfully and rides to Ned's. Sally, apparently recognizing that whatever Munny has in mind cannot end well, just glares at him without speaking the entire time he is there. If looks could kill, not only Munny and Ned but the entire movie audience would be dead by the end of the scene. But as it is, the two men ride off in pursuit of the Kid. Eventually they catch him, and soon discern that he is severely nearsighted and can't see a target more than 50 yards away.The first to arrive in Big Whiskey in pursuit of the reward is a gray-haired Englishman known as English Bob (Richard Harris). We first meet him traveling on a train with his biographer, named Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek). President Garfield has just been shot (which, of course, occurred in 1881, meaning that some months have passed since the original attack on Delilah), and Bob is lecturing his fellow-passengers on the benefits of monarchy over democracy (despite the Russian Tsar also being assassinated earlier that same year). He and Beauchamp arrive in Big Whiskey, where Little Bill catches him concealing a gun. He brutally beats and kicks Bob until he is nearly unconscious, then throws both him and Beauchamp in jail. At the jail, Little Bill debunks many of the stories Bob has told Beauchamp about his exploits. Soon Beauchamp is out of his cell and working as Little Bill's biographer rather than Bob's. Little Bill finally puts Bob on a train out of town. Munny and his companions see the train carrying English Bob go by as they approach town.A torrential downpour begins, and by the time the Munny party reaches town, Munny is sick with fever. Arriving at the saloon, Ned and the Kid go upstairs to engage the services of the prostitutes, but Munny doesn't do that sort of thing anymore and remains downstairs. Little Bill sizes Munny up as an out-of-towner after the reward money, and beats and kicks him in a similar way to what he did to English Bob, has him thrown out into the street, and sends his deputies upstairs after Ned and the Kid. Ned and the Kid escape through a window, manage to get Munny onto his horse, and ride out of town, where Ned nurses Munny back to health with the help of some of the prostitutes.By the time Munny has regained his health, the rain has stopped but there is snow on the ground. In the next scene the snow is gone, meaning some time has been elapsing as Munny's partners have scouted out their targets. In that next scene, we see Davey with a group of cowboys chasing a calf. A shot rings out, hitting Davey's horse, which falls over, breaking the man's leg and pinning him to the ground. Ned fired the shot, but now he can't bring himself to finish the man off, and the Kid can't see that far, so Munny fires several shots and finally hits him. As Davey lies dying, he complains of being thirsty. Munny calls out to the other cowboys to give the man a drink, and promises not to shoot. They do, and Munny is true to his word.Ned has had enough of killing and leaves his companions to return home, but is captured by Little Bill's men, and we see him being interrogated by Little Bill. Men are also assigned to protect Mike. Munny and the Kid wait outside the house where Mike and his guards are holed up. When Mike comes out to use the outhouse, the Kid waits until he is finished and then shoots him. But the Kid can't deal with the fact that he has killed a man (he has boasted repeatedly of having killed five men, but now admits that this was his first), and resolves to never kill again, telling Munny, "I'm not like you." Munny has him drink some whiskey, but it doesn't help.One of the prostitutes brings the reward money and informs them that Ned has been killed, after revealing Munny's identity. Munny sends the Kid home with the reward money, telling him to leave his and Ned's shares with his children and take the rest and use it to buy some good spectacles. He then rides toward town, drinking whiskey from a bottle as he goes. Outside the saloon, he sees Ned's body upright in an open casket, with a sign saying that this is what happens to assassins in this town.Munny enters the saloon, where most of the townsmen have gathered. He asks who owns the establishment, and when Skinny identifies himself, Munny tells the men near him to move away, and then shoots him. Little Bill calls him a coward for shooting an unarmed man, but Munny replies, "He should have armed himself, if he's going to decorate his saloon with my friend." He then tells those near Little Bill to move away. His shotgun misfires, but he throws it at Little Bill, draws his pistol and shoots him, and shoots several other men attempting to draw guns on him; some of them get shots off before Munny kills them, but none hit him.He then tells everyone who doesn't want to be killed to leave, and all who are able to leave do so. He goes to the bar and helps himself to more whiskey. Beauchamp was not able to leave because of a body lying on top of him. Munny has him give him a rifle lying nearby, which he loads. Beauchamp tries to engage him in conversation about gunfighting, but Munny's response frightens him into leaving as well. Little Bill turns out to still be alive, but Munny hears him cock his pistol, and steps on his hand before he can get a shot off.As Munny aims his rife at Little Bill, the latter complains that he doesn't deserve this. Munny replies, "'Deserves' has nothing to do with it." Little Bill then says, "I'll see you in hell, William Munny." Munny simply replies, "Yeah," and shoots him. As he walks to the saloon door, one of the men he shot previously moans in pain, and he shoots him again.At the door, he announces that he is coming out, that he will kill anyone he sees, and if anyone shoots at him, he will kill not only the shooter but his wife and all his friends and burn his house down. He walks to his horse, and no one shoots. He mounts his horse and as he rides past Ned's body, he announces that if they don't bury Ned right, or if they harm the prostitutes in any way, he'll come back and kill every man in the town.As the closing credits roll, we learn that Munny subsequently moved with his children to San Francisco, where he "prospered in dry goods."

Tags: suspenseful, realism, murder, bleak, revenge, sadist

Review:
Now, desperately trying to support his children with no income, he is tempted back to his killing ways by the bounty offered by the women of a brothel, one of whom's number has been savagely beaten and disfigured by a drunken ranch-hand.The film follows Eastwood as he wrestles with his desire to honour his wife's memory and his need to feed his children by returning to the killer that, he fears, is his true nature.
Ford, Hawks, Leone, Peckinpah, all of them big names who have defined the Western genre in one way or another across the history of cinema, transforming what started as low-budget action films into an art itself where the American Old West served as setting for tales of mythical heroism, classic tragedies, and legendary adventures.
Actor and Director Clint Eastwood is probably one of the most knowledgeable artists about the Western genre, as his acting career began as the legendary "Man With No Name" in the Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns of the 60s.
As a director, he somewhat continued this legacy through movies like "High Plains Drifter" and "Pale Rider", but finally in 1992, Eastwood released what many consider his final ode to the Western, and his ultimate masterpiece of the genre: "Unforgiven", an epic saga about the deconstruction of the Western myths.Clint Eastwood himself plays William Munny, a former gunslinger who is now living a peaceful life as a farmer with his two children.
However, Munny's past as a notorious thief and murderer will return to haunt him in this last mission, as the Kid shows a true and honest admiration for Munny's fame as a gunslinger, even when Munny himself considers his past as villainous.While better known for his work in science fiction, David Webb Peoples' screenplay proves to be a very accurate description of life in the American west, particularly concerning the aspects of the uses and abuses of violence in that era.
Peoples' screenplay is remarkably well written, as the many characters and their relationships are exhaustively explored, resulting in a character driven revisionism of the western, that in many ways criticizes the genre's origins as violent "Shoot 'em up" films.Peoples' script is definitely the movie's backbone, but it is Eastwood's masterful direction what transforms this meditation of violence into a unique revision of the Western.
Eastwood's style, originated by the influence of Sergio Leone and Don Siegel, and developed through many stages seems to finally have spawned its masterpiece in this film.As William Munny, Clint Eastwood is simply perfect in what at first sight looks like an extension of his earlier "Man with no name" persona.
Morgan Freeman is also very good as Ned Logan, although like Jaimz Woolvett (who plays The Schofield Kid), gets easily overshadowed by Gene Hackman's powerful performance as Little Bill Daggett.
The legendary Richard Harris has a small appearance as another aging gunslinger, English Bob, in very memorable scenes where he demonstrates why he is considered one of the best actors of his generation.After starting his career playing a mythical hero in Leone's "Dollars" trilogy, it is actually fitting that is Eastwood who explores the figure of hero in his many movies.
Eastwood has explored this theme in many ways in the past: first as a true antihero ("High Plains Drifter"), then as a man becoming legend ("The Outlaw Josey Wales") and later as a true mythic hero ("Pale Rider"); all this culminates in "Unforgiven" as the ultimate demythologization of the concept, and his final ode to the Western genre.
While the movie indeed feels a bit "preachy" at times, the story is devised in such a way that it never feels too heavy handed, as it unfolds nicely as a classic epic tale of the West.Personally, I can't praise this movie enough, as it is easily one of the best Westerns done since Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch", and required viewing not only for fans of the genre.
Widowed and struggling to raise his two children on a paltry farm, he's tempted out of retirement for one last pay dirt job, the consequence of which provides violence - both physically and of the soul.Clint Eastwood signed off from the Western genre with this magnificent 1992 picture, the appropriation and irony of which is in itself a majestic point of reference.
This gives Unforgiven an excellent sleight of hand, for this West is grim and a destroyer of all illusions and it's not controversial to say that this is indeed a good thing.Eastwood is greatly served by the actors around him, Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman (winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for a script he turned down many years before!), Rubinek, Frances Fisher, Anna Thomson, Jaimz Woolvett and an incredible cameo from Richard Harris.
Along with Hackman's win for his brutally tough portrayal of Sheriff "Little Bill" Daggett, Unforgiven also won Oscars for Eastwood for his clinically tight direction, Best Picture, Best Editing and it was nominated in another five categories.
He is now only a killer, in it neither for money or fame as the writer nearly finds out to his tragic detriment.Those who have only seen his Westerns of old or the 'Dirty Harry' movies may enter the cinema with expectations of such like will either be disappointed or pleasantly surprised.
The choice of word 'coward' is to say that they should be killers, as that is apparently what a man is (an exaggeration) as most westerns glorify violence, but the men can't handle it.Clint Eastwood did an amazing job as William Munny.
The story is well presented with Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman doing great jobs as old gunmen Munny and Logan.
Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" is a nod to the old spaghetti westerns from the sixties and seventies, such as "The Dollars Trilogy" by Sergio Leone, the very films that made Eastwood a major Hollywood player.
He's a man beaten by his heart more than by any enemy he has encountered in the past.Gene Hackman is always good for bad guy roles, mainly because he can create some of the most hateable characters of all time.
Certainly the director of that movie, Don Siegel, were he still alive at the time, would have done a better job with "Unforgiven", as he had as director of earlier Eastwood films.
Rated among the top 10 of all time western epics.Clint Eastwood has directed a masterpiece here.The acting by him too is superb.His role as William Munny as once a notorious evil man is just the best in his career.Munny takes up a last job.He ain't that good enough now.As he used to be once.But circumstances change & then in the end we see why everyone was scared of William Munny.Brilliant character display.Morgan freeman does a terrific performance as Ned.The accomplice of Wiliam Munny.Oscar deserving role.Not to forget Gene Hackman as 'Little Bill'.His acting is just totally out of the box.All in all this movie is a success for the international cinema.A unique movie in its own.Hats of to Clint for this masterpiece.William Munny,a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition.Was he??Truly Oscar deserving..
Worth the wait and i should have watched it about 13 years ago.I like westerns but felt the days of good ones were long gone( with the exception of Maverick and perhaps young guns in a bubble gum sort of way, but those are separate reviews...on to this one.The story is good but not relevant to this piece of art work any story with this quality of feeling would be a winner.
This is about morals and perceptions of them.Yes it is only a movie but for a movie it is touching and intense.The basic story is about a retied "bad guy" needing money and pulling one last mission to make right a wrong done to a prostitute.From there it just gets better, lots of amazing characters, good bad but mostly just normal in a tough time.I wont tell you much of the story..i rarely do in my reviews, but I must say for a Drama this thing rocks.Highly recommended ,it has a slightly melancholy feel to it.I loved it..
Directed and starring Clint Eastwood, this classical Western is a plot that we've all seen many times over.
The movie was made in 1992; they absolutely could have done a better job on making her wounds look worse.Unforgiven definitely had an all-star cast with actors like Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman.
Bill Munny, Clint Eastwood's character doesn't speak much of the movie and has the same snarling ho-hum demeanor the entire film.
There are a few memorable and very tense scenes in this film, and a fair share of profanity, too, including too many usages of the Lord's name in vain.Watching the likes of Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman as the three main stars, however, is pretty entertaining.
Morgan Freeman plays Eastwood's lower-key old partner, "Ned Logan." In the minor roles, Jaimz Woolvett, who played "The Schofield Kid," reminded me of a young David Arquette but I haven't heard Woolvett's name since this movie.Overall, a rough film but a pretty solid western which would have been better and accepted by the public better had the language been toned down..
Joining the Schofield Kid and his old partner Ned, the trio set off unaware of the welcome in store for gunslingers from Sheriff Little Bill Daggett.A rightful Oscar winner of it's time, Unforgiven is one of the better Westerns of the last 15 years or so.
Shattering the ideals and myths that we have been sold by westerns over the years and looking at the effect of violence on men  this is almost an anti-gun film with gunfights such is the strength of the despair that Eastwood takes his character to.
So far as I am concerned it succeeded in being neither, just boring, with the characters poorly depicted.I would call this the worst movie that I have ever seen for both Clint Eastwood, and also for Morgan Freeman, who is one of my favorite actors..
No real break outs, Clint Eastwood continues to get accolades for acting and directing as Morgan Freeman continues to get nominated for the next ten years until Million Dollar Baby where he wins for best supporting.
I can think of many anti-violence Westerns that are years or even decades older than Unforgiven -- The Ox-Bow Incident springs to mind, and even Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West showed the horrible consequences of violence without getting on a soapbox about it.On a similar note, I'd like to point out that The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance had already explored the idea of "debunking" mythological Western figures, while The Wild Bunch exposed an aging gunslinger's fallibility by showing him slip and fall while trying to mount a horse.
Who knows?Ultimately, I feel very little guilt in proclaiming that a fun/violent Western like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is actually a lot better than Unforgiven, even if it isn't as self-consciously PC.
The good guys are not as good as we make them out to be,and the bad guys are not entirely bad.That is the reality,and Clint does a great job of driving this point home.Excellent work here by all involved,including Clint Eastwood,Gene Hackman,and my personal favorite actor,Morgan Freeman.We are all,whether good or bad,at the very root of our being, human.Great film..
We all know that those times were wild, uncivilized and brutal, so, I guess, there is no need for movies like Unforgiven, since we have plenty of examples of the darker side of human nature around us.On the plus side I have to admit that there is some good acting, specially Eastwood.
But as William Munny goes in the process of achieving it, he realizes his haunting decay as he sees disturbing hallucinations and remembers innocent people that he murdered inconsiderably, and so William dissolves a recognized darkness into his soul that slowly increases as the film goes along.The performances by Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, Jaimz Woolvett and Gene Hackman are all according to character and both remain stable and loyal to the characters themselves and fully replicating themselves as if they were them with changes in emotion, posture, voice and personality.
Clint Eastwood both directs and stars in this Academy Award winning(best picture and director) film, a western featuring Eastwood as aging reformed gunfighter Will Munny, lured out of retirement to collect a much needed bounty on the group of cowboys who cut up a prostitute.
With two brilliant lead actors this film, Morgan Freeman plays an awesome supporting role making his character, and this movie, unforgettable..
Listed as one of the best western films ever, unforgiven boast of a barrel of actors all making sure that their screen time is not wasted, Clint Eastwood is going to go down in the record books as one great movie maker because of this flick, the timing of the movie is just right at every turn, the movie plot is rich with enough events to keep you glued.
This was Eastwood's last western and it was a critical and box office success.The movie plot is about a town where the Sheriff 'Little Bill' (Gene Hackman) is trying to make sure that all is well and peace reigns, then some notorious cowboys go to a whore house and cut a prostitute.Little Bill implements justice in the way he felt best, but the prostitutes wanted to deal with the cowboys as they felt revenge is the best way to deal with the situation.
But his wife is dead and Munny is struggling with farm life and the raisin of two children, so chasing after the bounty was a good idea to him so he called his old comrade Ned (Morgan Freeman) and they go after the cowboys.Unforgiven won four Academy Awards in its year, these awards were Best Picture (Clint Eastwood), Best Director (Clint Eastwood), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Gene Hackman), and Best Film Editing.
Clint Eastwood himself was nominated for Best Actor, but he lost to Al Pacino for Scent of a Woman.If you have not gotten a taste of this classic movie, maybe it is high time you did, Unforgiven is a wonderful movie to have in your DVD collection, the acting was second to known and the script was both funny as it was thrilling.www,lagsreview.com.
Director Clint Eastwood has throughout his career consistently been top-notch as both star and director, and he really accomplishes greatness with this film.The movie is set during a transitional time when the Old West is rapidly turning into the modern world, but this isn't the only transition it examines.
Clint Eastwood's Oscar-winning western "Unforgiven" is said by some to be an elegy to the genre, an honest and probing examination of killing.
Then, some unexpected events force him to have to decide whether to continue his non-violent life or return to violence.It seems to me that "Malcolm X" deserved Best Picture more than this one did, but Eastwood certainly turns in a captivating performance, as do Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, and Richard Harris.
Unforgiven (1992)This is modern western produced and directed by Clint Eastwood.
The film has a terrific cast with Morgan Freeman as his old buddy Ned, a perfectly cast Gene Hackman as a kick-butt Sheriff named Little Bill, and a cool cameo by Richard Harris as the assassin English Bob. Saul Rubinek from the recent Warehouse TV series plays an interesting writer character who just happens to be in the right spot at the right time.The local whorehouse gets in an uproar when one of their own gets disfigured by a local ruffian.
The story centers around Eastwood and Freeman getting recruited out of their now sedentary farmer lives to help the greater good of these women who have no one who will stand up for them as people.In the end, will Clint turn back to his old killer self?
Unforgiven (1992)Plot In A Paragraph: William Munny (Eastwood) a retired gunslinger reluctantly takes on one last job, with the help of his old partner (Morgan Freeman) and a young man.Along with 1984's Tightrope, Unforgiven is Clint Eastwood's darkest film.
Saw it like 4 times, it never gets old and i'm never getting tired of this movie.Basically "Unfogiven" is farewell to western genre, Clint Eastwood was once famous for.
We've had a few good westerns since then and before that, but the simple, character-driven drama in "Unforgiven" just hits home in a way that is hard to match.Just like all good genre movies, this isn't so much about the genre itself, but a simple story with plenty of human elements.
Two very different kinds of westerns, both magnificent in their own way.So Clint Eastwood is the man, that much is clear, but everyone else is good too.
Clint Eastwood's last modern classic masterpiece western film he made!.
We'll both be better off.Unforgiven 1992 is which I believe is Clint Eastwood's last western masterpiece that is a modern classic that he made.
I love Eastwood, Freeman and Hackman they all gave wonderful acting performance in this film, that is pretty good.
Unforgiven is a 1992 American western film directed and produced by Clint Eastwood, who also starred in the lead role.
Unforgiven An outstanding movie to capture the old west, if you expect to see a Spaghetti Western you might be disappointed the way I see it is a beautiful last chapter to the Man with no name, which Sergio Leone created back in 1964.
Around a rather poor and somewhat unconvincing story of a group of bar prostitutes trying to hire a killer to revenge the barbarous cut up of one of them by two cowboys, Clint Eastwood made a good western movie in technical and formal terms with a de luxe cast (himself, Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman and Richard Harris).
How could Clint go wrong the way he rounded up Richard Harris, Gene Hackman and Freeman Morgan to appear in his movie.