Warner Bro. Pictures
Director: Clint Eastwood
The dialogue at the beginning of Unforgiven really had me wondering why on earth this film makes the top of every list for "Greatest Westerns of All-Time." Since it was so highly rated I kept watching and I am glad I did. This really is a good film. It is however the height of a revisionist western, going so far as literally revising a western dime novel(clever reference to the Duke) in the film! There are no heroes or villains only men doing what they think is right. In a sense though this concept is at the very core of the western. In a lawless frontier, a man is what he makes of himself and how he makes it.
A couple cowboys in Wyoming have cut up a whore and her friends have put together enough for a bounty. The young "kid schofield" (Jaimz Woolvett) wants to collect and finds retired outlaws William Munny (Clint Eastwood) and Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) to assist him. The one man standing to defend the cowboys is Sheriff Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman). These three do an amazing job and Eastwood really gets it (though if anyone should...). This is True Grit taken to an even grittier and more compelling conclusion. Again the lack of heroes on white horses is palpable and I tend to think these types of westerns are a genre all to themselves but I can see why it won the Academy Award for Best Picture (an honor shared only with Cimarron (1931) and Dances With Wolves (1990) for the genre) and Best Director. A fitting "last western" for Eastwood. Now come to think of it, this is really the Clint Eastwood version of John Wayne's The Shootist.
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