Blake asked for my opinion of the Clint Eastwood movie "Unforgiven" and as with most things it is a mixed bag.
It is a far cry from the traditional John Wayne Western that we all know and love. All of the romance and symbolism is leached out. Or at least the optimistic symbolism. It is a gritty, dirty and realistic Western and one of the movies that best depicts real violence that I have ever seen. I am sure AllenS or RogerJ can give a much better description of what it means to be in a violent situation as they were soldiers and real first hand experience. In my somewhat limited but intense experience with the same a lot of what happens in this movie rings true. It is not a great thing to be a witness or to be involved in violence. You can get sick to your stomach. People bleed and they die crying out for their mother as they void their bowels and whimper as they pass. It is not beautiful and noble and painless like a shootout on "Gunsmoke." It is real meat as it were. Unforgiven shows that in all it's realistic pain and shit and piss and lack of glory. So it does have that to say for it.
Will Munny is a sociopath. He kills and shrugs it off because people are not real to him.That was what a lot of the famous Western hero's were really like. They never show that in the movies even the ones they today. For instance the Earps were pimps and gamblers. They wore a badge to protect their business interests. Wyatt Earp mainly lived off the monies he made from the whores he lived with. The last one was an "actress" who cleaned up his image with her biography of him in the 1920's that has been made in many a movie even to this day. But Wyatt had more in common with Iceberg Slim than he did with John Wayne. So the character of the Sheriff was right on the money.
The ultimate in realistic Western film making was in view "Deadwood" on HBO. It had all the gritty and realistic takes on violence and frontier life but still had poetry and optimism. You see we can forget the actual tenor of the times. The educated types would much more be likely to quote Homer or the Bible or Shakespeare and there was the glimmer of a Victorian sensibility. I mean they did the dirty deeds but they tried to cover it up a little better than you see in "Unforgiven."
I think "Unforgiven" is the best of all of Clint Eastwood's films but it still lacks poetry in my view. But it is well worth a viewing if you have the time.
