Just watched it again last night.
Very good movie. Good plot, pretty good cast, but I still can’t put it in my top 10 Westerns.
To be honest, maybe it’s a little too dark for me. I want my cowboy heroes to be good guys I guess. But that ain’t completely it either.
I love Duke in “The Searchers”’and “Red River”, Fonda in “Once Upon A Time” and Glenn Ford in “3:10 To Yuma”. All top 10s for me, 2 of them top 5 easily!
I can’t really put my finger on anything definite but there’s many others I like much more for whatever reason.
Reon

The Searchers was much darker than unforgiven given it’s subject matter

Not all Good movies are meant to make you feel better. They illicit a strong emotional response that stays with you

No Country for Old Men isn't exactly a feel-good movie either, But I would include it in my top 10 westerns. Unforgiven in my top 3.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bad Eastwood western

Not big on it.

Osky

I've seen exactly one--"Bronco Billy" if you can make the stretch to call it a Western--It was horrible to say the least.

7mmbuster: "Very good" - I disagree, it was an excellent if not exceptional movie!
Maybe YOU are not aware the movie "Unforgiven" is one of just 3 (three!) "westerns" to ever win the Academy Award for "Best Picture"!
There have been a LOT of western movies made here in America.
The movie won 4 (four) Academy Awards and was nominated for a total of 9 (nine!) Academy Awards.
The movie cost $14,000,000.00 (fourteen million dollars) to make and brought in $160,000,000.00 (one hundred and sixty million dollars) in its initial theatrical run.
This is not counting after initial run income.
Additionally Clint Eastwood was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor but lost that year to Al Pacino ("Scent Of A Woman").
I am just puzzled that you only rate this gem at "very good" - I again, disagree.
Long live Clint Eastwood (great actor and director).
You almost earned a dreaded "sheesh" with your under-rating!
Hold into the wind
VarmintGuy

A more recent movie I’ve watched 1/2 a dozen times is the assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford.Pretty good movie 👍👍

I can’t stand the line about 30-30 shells in Unforgiven otherwise great movie

You just shot an unarmed man!
Well he should have armed himself if he’s gonna decorate his saloon with my friend.
Awesome line…

Hadn’t heard of it, I’ll check it out.

Dam good movie

It's good but it's not top 10 good. But it beats plenty of Marion Morrison movies.

Ride with the devil is good

Sheesh!

If you base all your opinions on what “the academy” tells you to think, you’ll vote democrat & spend all your spare money on Taylor Swift concerts.

Sheesh!

"Well, I guess they had it coming..."

"We all have it coming, kid"

Never been a fan.
I just don't care for the story.
I'll go farther.
I think the story sucks.
There are much better westerns.


dave

Pale rider 👍

ya!

GWB

Way I rember the story, it's supposed to be more like what the old west was really like . Not what the movies portrayed it.

I didn't like it the 1st time I watched it. Probably for the same reasons as the OP. But I've seen it several times since and like it more every time. Still not sure it's a top 10 for me, but it is a very good movie.

Critic’s picks don’t mean squat to me!😀 Nor do academy awards!
Christ, I grew up watching Westerns with my Old Man. He was my hero, and I found some more on the silver screen.
Duke, Fonda, Ford, and many others.
As you’ve maybe seen on the other threads, many have stepped outta history to make the list!
I honestly can’t say why, but some movies don’t make the grade, and some that the critics don’t like, I love.
Here in this country, we’re allowed to disagree about what we like or don’t like.
Sheesh😀!
Reon

Top 10 westerns , sure. Good film.

Yep. The Searchers is pretty darn dark.

Any movie that kills Gene Hackman is a good movie.

👍

#1, The Outlaw Josie Wales! MTG

Searchers is a dark movie for the 50's. Wayne's character was broken.

That's why I like Hondo, its classic Wayne

Unforgiven was an amazing movie watching it in the theater

But NO nfl!

Correct!

I always liked Robert Duvall he’s a no bullschit actor

Those old westerns... A lot of suspension of disbelief is necessary to get through them for me. Lots of beautiful thin gals, piles of makeup and perfect hair, floor length dresses immaculately clean.. yeah I'm sure that's what the 1800s look like in western towns..
Don't get me started on the endless soundtracks to those movies!

Yep. And Searchers is based very loosely on the real life story of Cynthia Ann Parker. Chief Quanah Parker’s mother.

The Searches will always be the all time Best Western in my book, and also one of the best movies ever made. Period. 🤠

And Tombstone, which is 10 times better than Unforgiven, is definitely in the Top 10. Top 5 in my book, for sure.

Unforgiven was OK. But not one of the Top 10 Best Westerns of all time.

The best part of Unforgiven was when Little Bill was taunting the “Duck of Death” while he had him in jail.
And offered him his six shooter. 😂

No no no the best part of unforgivin was the whore who said lil bill had a good name 🤣😂🤣😂

I never thought that Wayne's character, Ethan Edwards, in The Searchers, was "broken."

If one reads about the Comanche raids and depredations of that time period, it is easy to understand Wayne's character and obsessive quest. Edwards (Wayne) was very aware of who the Comanches were and their unlimited brutality and cruelty to white settlers and even other Indian tribes they raided and fought.

If anyone is interested in just what the Comanches were like and how times were in that period, I suggest getting a copy of Empire of the Summer Moon, by S.C. Gwynne, Publ. Schribner, ©2010. It is one of the best on the Comanches I've read. You'll read about not only Cynthia Ann Parker but her sister Rachel Parker Plummer who was also captured and carried off by the Comanches when they raided and destroyed Fort Parker in Texas. Her experiences were horrible, also.

I do not compare Unforgiven and The Searchers because they were two totally different western flicks. I liked them both and thought both were well done.

My opinion.

L.W.

Digger, please

And all of the prostitutes looked and dressed like Shirley Temple or Angelina Jolie in the mining camps and western towns in the 1800’s

I wonder if there are two different no country for old men movies.

Did the one you liked involve a guy killing people with a slaughterhouse pneumatic gun? The one I saw did and ranks right up there with Fargo as one of the worst movies I've ever had the misfortune of wasting my time watching.

LW. Great book and great read. I’ve read it several times.

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.

Unforgiven is a fantastic western, breaking some of the traditional western stereotypes. Clint played the part of a salvaged killer that was influenced by a person you never saw in the movie.

Much like Katie Elder in “The Sons Of Katie Elder” a star in the movie that never showed up in the movie, William Munny’s wife changed Munny from a viscous killer to a family man. That was until the end of the film when he came out of the saloon as the resurrected killer, a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition.

Little Bill was not the bad man some people misunderstood him for. He too, was a man with a violent past, but settled down in Big Whisky and kept order in a small town that needed what he had to offer. He understood what the prostitutes brought to Big Whisky, by soliciting an assassin to take care of the reckless cowboys who got caught up in an unexcused moment and cut up the whore.

He took care of English Bob and kept the community safe from other prospective assassins, until William Munny showed up.

Those that said there was no humor, must have missed the part where Munny taunted the Schofield Kid into looking for a hawk in the air that didn’t exist. The Schofield Kid is what regenerated William Munny from farmer to killer again, but had poor eyesight and added another dimension to a film that still stands apart as 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".

Additionally, the story may have some dark themes, but it is well cast and exceptionally acted and directed, although it only won 4 Academy Awards, it was nominated for 9.

Anyone not liking “Unforgiven” as a western has overlooked much of what the west was really like, although that much action and convergence of sordid characters was really rare in the 19th century…

"Little Bill was not the bad man some people misunderstood him for. He too, was a man with a violent past, but settled down in Big Whisky and kept order in a small town that needed what he had to offer. He understood what the prostitutes brought to Big Whisky, by soliciting an assassin to take care of the reckless cowboys who got caught up in an unexcused moment and cut up the whore."

Nice observation. I thought the same. Little Bill shows the double edge meanness of idealism. Creating Utopia by force turns good intentions on its head. Unforgiven isn't really a western. It's Shakespearean, or Greek, tragedy in an imaginary western setting.