In 2004, Unforgiven was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[5] The film was remade into a 2013 Japanese film, also titled Unforgiven, which stars Ken Watanabe and changes the setting to the early Meiji era in Japan. Eastwood has long asserted that the film would be his last traditional Western, concerned that any future projects would simply rehash previous plotlines or imitate someone else's work.[6]
Plot
In 1881, in Big Whiskey, Wyoming, a cowboy named Quick Mike slashes prostitute Delilah Fitzgerald's face with a knife, permanently disfiguring her after she laughs at his small penis. As punishment, sheriff "Little Bill" Daggett orders Mike and his associate who was with him at the brothel, Davey Bunting, to turn over several of their horses to Delilah's employer, Skinny DuBois, for his loss of revenue. Outraged, the prostitutes offer a $1,000 bounty for the cowboys' deaths.
In Hodgeman County, Kansas, a boastful young man visits Will Munny's hog farm. He calls himself the "Schofield Kid" and claims to be an experienced bounty hunter looking for help pursuing the cowboys. Formerly a notorious outlaw and murderer, Will is now a repentant widower raising two children. After initially refusing to help, Will realizes that his farm is failing and his children's future is in jeopardy. He recruits his friend Ned Logan, another retired outlaw, and they catch up with the Kid, who, they discover, is severely near-sighted.
Back in Big Whiskey, British-born gunfighter "English" Bob, an old acquaintance and rival of Little Bill, seeks the bounty. He arrives in town with his biographer W. W. Beauchamp, who naively believes Bob's tall tales. Enforcing the town's anti-gun law, Little Bill, with his deputies, disarms Bob and beats him savagely to discourage others from attempting to claim the bounty. Bob, humiliated, is banished from town the next morning, but Beauchamp stays out of a fascination with the Sheriff, who debunks many of the romantic notions Beauchamp has about the Wild West. Little Bill explains to Beauchamp that the best attribute for a gunslinger is to be cool-headed under fire rather than to have the quickest draw, and to always kill the best shooter first.
Will, Ned, and the Kid arrive in town during a rainstorm and enter Skinny's saloon. While Ned and the Kid meet with the prostitutes upstairs, Little Bill confronts a feverish Will. Not realizing Will's identity but correctly guessing that he wants the bounty, Bill confiscates his pistol and beats him. Ned and the Kid escape through a back window and take Will to an unoccupied barn outside of town, where they and the prostitutes nurse him back to health. A few days later, the trio ambush Davey. After missing Davey and shooting his horse, Ned falters and Will shoots Davey instead. Ned decides to quit and return to Kansas.
Ned is later captured and flogged to death by Little Bill to learn the whereabouts of Will and the Kid. Will takes the Kid with him to the cowboys' ranch, directing him to ambush Quick Mike in the outhouse and shoot him. After they escape, a distraught Kid drunkenly confesses he had never killed anyone before and is overcome with remorse. A prostitute arrives with the reward and tells them about Ned's fate. Shocked by the news, Will begins drinking and demands the Kid's revolver. The two discuss the gravity of killing with Will observing: "It's a hell of a thing killin' a man. You take away all he's got, and all he's ever gonna have." The Kid hands his gun over, saying that he no longer wants to be a killer, and Will sends him back to Kansas to distribute the reward.
That night, Will finds Ned's corpse displayed in a coffin outside Skinny's saloon. Inside, Little Bill and his deputies are organizing a posse. Will walks in alone, brandishing a shotgun, and kills Skinny for displaying Ned's corpse. He then aims at Little Bill, but the shotgun misfires. In the ensuing gunfight, Will shoots Little Bill and several other men with the revolver. He then orders the rest of the posse out. Beauchamp lingers briefly to ask how Will survived. Will replies that it was luck and scares him away. Little Bill tries and fails to take another shot while lying on the floor, then bemoans his fate and curses Will, who shoots him dead. Will shouts threats as he mounts his horse and rides out of town.
A closing title card states that Will's mother-in-law found his farm abandoned years later, Will having possibly moved to San Francisco with the children, and she remained at a loss to understand why her daughter married such a notorious outlaw and murderer.
The film was written by David Webb Peoples, who had written the Oscar nominated film The Day After Trinity and co-written Blade Runner with Hampton Fancher.[7] The concept for the film dated to 1976, when it was developed under the titles The Cut-Whore Killings and The William Munny Killings.[7] The script was originally optioned by Francis Ford Coppola, who failed to raise the money to develop the project any further.[8][9] By Eastwood's own recollection, he was given the script in the "early 80s" although he did not immediately pursue it, because, according to him, "I thought I should do some other things first".[10] Eastwood personally phoned Harris to offer him the role of English Bob, and later said Harris was watching Eastwood's movie High Plains Drifter at the time of the phone call, leading to Harris thinking it was a prank.[11] Hackman was hesitant to play Bill Daggett, as his daughters were upset that he was starring in too many violent films; but Eastwood convinced him to do it.[12]
Filming took place between August 26, 1991, and November 12, 1991.[13] Much of the film was shot in Alberta in August 1991 by director of photography Jack Green.[14] Production designer Henry Bumstead, who had worked with Eastwood on High Plains Drifter, was hired to create the "drained, wintry look" of the western.[14] The railroad scenes were filmed on the Sierra Railroad in Tuolumne County, California.[15]
Themes
Like other Revisionist Westerns, Unforgiven is primarily concerned with deconstructing the morally black-and-white vision of the American West which was established by traditional works in the genre, as the script is saturated with unnerving reminders of the now teetotal Munny's own horrific past as a drunken murderer and gunfighter who is haunted by the lives he's taken,[16] while the film as a whole "reflects a reverse image of classical Western tropes": the protagonists, rather than avenging a God-fearing innocent, are hired to collect a bounty offered by a group of prostitutes. Men who claim to be fearless killers are variously exposed as being either cowards, weaklings, or self-promoting liars, while others find that they no longer have it in them to take yet another life. A writer with no concept of the harshness and cruelty of frontier life publishes stories which glorify common criminals as infallible men of honor. The law is represented by a pitiless and cynical former gun-slinger whose idea of justice is often swift and without mercy, and while the main protagonist initially tries to resist his own violent impulses, the murder of his old friend drives him to become the same cold-blooded killer he once was, suggesting that a Western hero is not necessarily "the good guy", but is instead "just the one who survived".[17][self-published source?]
Film scholar Allen Redmon describes Munny's role as an anti-hero by stating he is "a virtuous or an injured hero [who] overcomes all obstacles to see that evil is eradicated, using whatever means necessary".[18]
Literary allusions
Unforgiven shares many parallels with Homer's Iliad, in characters and themes. "In both works, the protagonists – Achilles and William Munny – are self-questioning warriors who temporarily reject the culture of violence only to return to it after the death of their closest male friend, in which they are implicated."[19] Munny and Achilles have the same dilemma between fate and counter-fate. They know that their fate is being a warrior and likely dying that way; however, they both try to reject it for at least some time. Munny continually claims he has changed and "ain't like that no more" referring to his warrior-like hitman past, whereas Achilles continually refuses to be a soldier in the Greek army since he condemns Agamemnon for stealing his captured bride as war spoil.
Neither wants to kill for causes from their past (Munny being an outlaw, Achilles being a warrior-king) since they find them unjust. Both are committed to a "higher" cause—Munny to his children and his wife's wishes, and Achilles to the injustice of women-stealing and to Briseis, who at one point he would've had to sacrifice to Agamemnon to stop the war.
However, when their best friends are killed—Achilles' Patroclus and Munny's Ned—they allow their rage and desire for vengeance to make them return to their warrior-prescribed fate. Achilles rages against the Trojans and kills many. He gets vengeance by killing Hector and desecrating his corpse, dragging it around the town. Munny rages against Little Bill and his crew. He gets vengeance by killing them and Little Bill, threatening to kill anyone who opposes him.
There are however relevant differences in Homer's epic and Eastwood's film, namely that Achilles is fated to die in battle, whereas Munny moves to California at the end of the film to become a businessman to provide for his children. Whether Munny has successfully countered his warrior-fate is unclear, as is whether a life in dry goods redeems him as his love for his wife had done.
Reception
Box office
The film debuted at the top position in its opening weekend.[20][21] Its earnings of $15 million ($7,252 average from 2,071 theaters) in its opening weekend was the best-ever opening for a Clint Eastwood film at that time.[22] This was also the highest August opening weekend, holding that record until it was surpassed a year later by The Fugitive.[23] It spent a total of three weeks as the No. 1 film in North America. In its 35th weekend (April 2–4, 1993), capitalizing on its Oscar wins, the film returned to the Top 10 (spending another three weeks total there), ranking at No. 8 with a gross of $2.5 million ($2,969 average from 855 theaters), an improvement of 197 percent over the weekend before where it made $855,188 ($1,767 average from 484 theaters). The film closed on July 15, 1993, having spent nearly a full year in theaters (343 days / 49 weeks), having earned $101.2 million in North America, and another $58 million internationally for a total of $159.2 million worldwide.[24]
Critical response
Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports an approval rating of 96% based on 109 reviews, and an average rating of 8.80/10. The website's critical consensus states: "As both director and star, Clint Eastwood strips away decades of Hollywood varnish applied to the Wild West, and emerges with a series of harshly eloquent statements about the nature of violence."[25]Metacritic gave the film a score of 85 out of 100 based on 34 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[26] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.[27]
Jack Methews of the Los Angeles Times described Unforgiven as "the finest classical western to come along since perhaps John Ford's 1956 The Searchers." Richard Corliss in Time wrote that the film was "Eastwood's meditation on age, repute, courage, heroism—on all those burdens he has been carrying with such grace for decades."[22]Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert criticized the work, though the latter gave it a positive vote, for being too long and having too many superfluous characters (such as Harris' English Bob, who enters and leaves without meeting the protagonists). Despite his initial reservations, Ebert eventually included the film in his "The Great Movies" list.[28]
Unforgiven was named one of the ten best films of the year on 76 critics' lists, according to a poll of the nation's top 106 film critics.[29]
The music for the Unforgiven film trailer, which appeared in theatres and on some of the DVDs, was composed by Randy J. Shams and Tim Stithem in 1992. The main theme song, "Claudia's Theme", was composed by Clint Eastwood.[49]
The film was planned to be used as the theme for Six Flags Great Adventure's then-upcoming roller coaster, but market research showed that people found it to be too dark of a theme, so the ride's name was changed to Viper.[50]
In 2013, the Writers Guild of America ranked Peoples' script for Unforgiven as the 30th greatest ever written.[51]
Several story elements of the film are paralleled in "The Noblest of Men, and a Woman", a side-quest in the 2018 video game Red Dead Redemption 2, including an English Bob-like former gunfighter having his biography written by a naive journalist, the player having to visit an aging outlaw who runs a pig farm, the gunfighter revealing himself to be a complete fraud, a final shootout where the player kills him, and the journalist deciding to write a fictional account of the gunfighter's death that completely ignores the truth of what really happened.
Home media
Unforgiven was released as premium home video, on DVD and VHS, on September 24, 2002.[52] It was released on Blu-ray Book (a Blu-ray Disc with book packaging) on February 21, 2012. Special features include an audio commentary by Clint Eastwood biographer Richard Schickel; four documentaries including "All on Accounta Pullin' a Trigger", "Eastwood & Co.: Making Unforgiven", "Eastwood...A Star", and "Eastwood on Eastwood", and more.[53]Unforgiven was released on 4K UHD Blu-ray on May 16, 2017.[54]
A Japanese adaptation of Unforgiven, directed by Lee Sang-il and starring Ken Watanabe, was released in 2013. The plot of the 2013 version is very similar to the original, but it takes place in Japan during the Meiji period, with the main character being a samurai instead of a bandit.
Beard, William (2000). "Unforgiven: Anatomy of a Murderer". Persistence of Double Vision: Essays on Clint Eastwood. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. Archived from the original on April 11, 2009.
