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Unforgiven Customer Reviews (1 - 3 of 39 Reviews)

The Best Western Since The Wild Bunch
A great movie does not follow a formula but crafts a story that tells you something. Eastwood has done something magnificent here and in the process he's explained what's going on in many inferior Westerns. There are violent people in the world that handle situations differently than most, but this film is more about clarity of conviction than violence... if you are going to do something, you might as well commit yourself to it.

Unforgiven is a great movie and a compelling story. Peckinpah was one of the first to successfully film violent men. Cormac McCarthy and Hemingway successfully wrote about them. Pick up McCarthy's "No Country For Old Men" to see his take.

Unforgiven
It had been ages since I'd watched this. I saw it in a theater in the U.S. when it was new. And I was carrying many memories which were quite vague beyond the words, "This is great." Remembering more detail than that was kinda like Clint's character, William Munny, trying to remember everybody he killed. It's been a long time, a lot of miles, and a whole lot of drinkin'.

So, what are my thoughts on UNFORGIVEN this week, all these years later, watching the DVD at my home in China?

First scene, a bad guy slices a whore's face. I was appalled. I thought that perhaps it was a good movie but maybe that scene was gratuitous. Or maybe they just wanted to show us, "That guy needed killin," which is still a valid defense in the South. So, I decided to let it play.

A bit later, Gene Hackman's kicking the mess out of Richard Harris. I was appalled again. And this film never got any kinder or gentler. But isn't Gene Hackman wonderful? What a performance. Has he ever made a bad movie? None I've seen.

Finally, I remembered. This appalling, ugly violence was deliberate. When I first saw this movie, I'd been ingesting a steady diet of Hollywood, and I got the message even back then. I've been away from that diet a long time, and the message was even more obvious.

(Too obvious? Not for the crowd that admires Dirty Harry.)

Violent deeds carry heavy consequences. Gawd, that looks so flat as I type it. So trite. But heck, maybe you've seen some real world violence yourself. And then you see the Hollywood version. So different. This film did try to show us just how divergent the two are.

A soldier in Iraq claimed that whenever you kill somebody, you kill a piece of yourself. True, and yet a slight bit simplistic at the same time. To explain why I write that would be to sermonize ad nauseum, which is something the film never does. It is what it is, folks. Watch it.

The DVD also contains some very cool stuff about how it was made.


One of the best westerns ever made
In the interest of brevity, I will say only: UNFORGIVEN is one of the best western films ever made and certainly the best film Clint Eastwood has ever made; everybody in it is good -- except Gene Hackman, who is great; don't miss it.

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