Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992):
By the early nineties, the days of Best Picture Academy Award winners like Driving Miss Daisy and Rain Man were over. Oscar fell in love with violence, and gave us best pictures like The Silence of the Lambs, Braveheart, and the 6-million body count Holocaust flick Schindlers List. Any movie featuring as many shotgun deaths as Unforgiven was almost a lock to win, and win it did, taking home the Best Picture honors in 1992, as well as awards for director Clint Eastwood and supporting actor Gene Hackman.
The dirty little secret that apparently eluded Academy members was that Unforgiven is actually kind of anti-violence. What, you say . . . a Clint Eastwood film that doesn't like violence?? Well bear with me here--true enough, the theme of Unforgiven is that violence is, like, bad, but that doesn't mean the movie doesn't serve up plenty for entertainment purposes. Eastwood hasn't totally lost his touch.
The film tells the story of William Munny, who once upon a time did a lot of bad things like getting drunk and shooting people, like you'd expect any half-decent Clint Eastwood character in a western to do. Unfortunately, Will Munny met a chick named Claudia who "cured [him] of drink and wickedness," and made him get all boring and start working on a farm and raising a family. Oh yeah, and some pigs.
Now I'm not saying this is a good thing, but when Unforgiven starts, Claudia has died of smallpox, and Munny's ripe for heading back to his old corrupt ways. All it takes is some happenings in Big Whiskey, where a cowhand slashed a whore's face for giggling at his undersized pecker (in Clint Eastwood movies, the bad guys always have small dicks). The whores have put together a wad of cash, and are inviting any enterprising varmints to come to town to kill the offending cowhand.
The proposition is put to Munny by the Schofield kid, who claims to have killed 5 men (if you count the Mexican) and is aiming to kill a couple more to collect that cash. Munny could use the cash and he figures, what the hell . . . one last fling. (What did you think, we were gonna watch him feed pigs all movie?) So he goes to fetch his old buddy Ned (Morgan Freeman), and they head to Big Whiskey to do a killing.
The lawman in Big Whiskey is bad dude Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman). Little Bill likes keeping the piece, and he's got no patience for assassins, or "men of low character." That means he's not gonna have much time for Will and Ned when they come to town. Neither big Will nor Little Bill is much in the way of good guys, but they aren't wholly bad guys either. They're just a couple of fellas who lived by the sword once upon a time, and are likely to die by it.
Unforgiven does say violence isn't all glamour and glory, and that death is forever, but what the hell--Hackman and Eastwood beat the hell out of each other, a few dudes get shotgunned to death, and it has the Academy stamp of approval so you don't have to feel guilty about it. Enjoy.
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