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I’ll second that!

The opening scene and the writing of the prologue is one of the best in any movie of any genre. To me, “Unforgiven” is easily in the top ten, certainly in the top 5,and maybe the top 3 Westerns ever..



She was a comely young woman and not without prospects. Therefore it was heartbreaking to her mother that she would enter into marriage with William Munny, a known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition. When she died, it was not by his hands as her mother might have expected, but of smallpox. That was 1878.

Shoot out at the ugly outhouse

“Josey Wales” is top 5, “Pale Rider” doesn’t make the list.
Searchers is 1, Tombstone 2, Once Upon A Time 3, Josey Wales 4, Bend Of The River 5.
From there on back, the sequence will usually change depending on what I saw last!😀
Shane and Highnoon are great movies, but not top ten.
3:10 (1963), Cheyenne Social Club, Jubal, Red River, Shootist. In addition there probably a dozen others I love just as much.
Magnificent 7 easy Good Bad Ugly too.
To put Unforgiven higher than these I listed makes 0 sense to me.
Very good, not great!
Reon

Gene Hackman's character is interesting. Hates the dime novel characters, but perceives himself as the real deal. Almost God like, he intends to enforce righteous behavior. " But I was building my house" has to be one of the most pathetic expressions ever uttered.

Unforgiven was not very entertaining it lacked any sense of humor. The Eastwood spaghetti westerns had some humor. So did the magnificent Seven, remember McQueen saying we deal in lead?

Unforgiven was meant to dispel the Hollywood western myths so anyone that loved the John Wayne westerns of the 50s and 60s may not like Unforgiven.
1. No heros in Unforgiven. Every character is flawed so it is hard to like and root for anyone.
2. The whores aren’t sweet and pretty. The only better portrayal of western whore life was Deadwood.
3. The sheriff ain’t a good guy on a white horse. He is a violent killer.
4. No one wins in the end and rides off in the sunset. Instead Will Munny rides the pale horse out of town on a mud filled street in a rain storm shouting threats to the town people.

I thought it was great but I have liked a lot of movies that don’t have a happy ending.
I never cared for The Searchers but I can’t say why.

Watched it again late last year. I had stayed away from it because of the darkness. However, this time around I appreciated the darkness of the subject.

Many of us were raised up with the white hat cowboy. His killing and violence was righteous. Eastwood did a great job of portraying how much darkness, sin if you will, resides within all of us. Life isn’t black and white like we’d like it to be. There’s a lot of gray out there.

Anyone notice that the woman who played the whore with the cut up face was also in Tombstone. Her face had the same scars as in Unforgiven. Easy to spot a it was when S am E lliot saves her son from being trampled by the "cowboys".
PJ

I never considered No Country for Old Men a western.

Yeah, where did that come from?

Art, at its finest isn't meant to entertain if it is authentic and sincere. Entertainment is wonderful and enjoyable. Art delves into emotions, ideas, timeless situations that force human beings to face conflicts, challenges, and difficult choices that will change and define them profoundly forever. Loyalty, primal urges, herd mentality, fate, survival, hubris and greed and idealism all figure into this grim tale of good tortured by evil. And struggle for redemption, flawed as it is as well. It accomplishes a lot in a deceptively simple plot.

An astute analysis, CP.

L.W.

+1

Unforgiven was good, but it was Clint's attempt to undo the glamor of all the gun play in all the Westerns he and others did in the past. It was too much of that message for me.

"Shakespeare in Love" beat out "Saving Private Ryan" for best picture in 1998. Worthless metric.

"Avengers' Infinity War" brought in over $2,000,000,000.00. Another worthless metric.

Maybe. However gunplay still features prominently, as in the bar scene and the murder of Little Bill..

I think the movie ended the 'white knight' traditional hero of standard earlier westerns, possibly for good. In that way it functions as sort of a genre redefining piece.

I really liked Unforgiven...BECAUSE it wasn't a typical Hollywood Western..

That is not saying Hollywood Westerns, where the good guy gets the girl etc, are bad. I like the diversity.

I love John Wayne's last movie, "The Shootist" also.

Real life isn't Hollywood, and neither was the Wild West. I'd bet in the real world, more people were killed in the old west, by being shot in the back and never see it coming. And those doing the killing weren't any type of western hero righting wrongs either.

I like a good movie that shows diverse situations. IN "Unforgiven" I see a message of what today's world is being unfair, instead of the Good Guys always winning. Life isn't always fair... in fact more often than not, it isn't fair to many. I see that message in the movie " Unforgiven".. I think the name says the message it sends, in the best way. Be it the old West, or today's world.

Many of us subtly complain about society, and the "establishment". We can look at heroes fighting against it and uprooting it, even for just a brief moment. That is exactly like the story line in "Unforgiven", as I see it.

The hero rides off, not into the sunset, like traditional Hollywood Endings, but in the pouring rain in the dark of night, threatening that NO ONE better follow or come after him. And they better leave those "whores" alone, or he'll come back and kill anyone and all their family members and destroy all of their property.

Those mirror feelings people can see in today's daily society.... The Little Man, vs Big Government, and their putting their bootheal on everyone's neck. IN a western on TV, the little people can fight back and win by standing up and fighting for what they believe in.. yet standing up for what you believe in, still doesn't make the world all "all blue skies and clear sailing". It will still be big government, somewhere else the next day, and it will be right back after being briefly overcome.

There are social messages in a lot of movies, especially in the last 30 plus years...and a western is a good theme to show the conflict, without raising enough red flags, for many people to see how it applies to our daily lives now.

If nothing else, social messages in a neutral light, lets us draw a comparison to our daily lives now...but many never see the message that the writers put into the stories.

John, for a fairly historical short book about the wild west - try "Wildest of the Wild West" by Howard Bryan.
As far as I can tell it is pretty accurate. You'll recognize some of the pictures.