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.
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When my father was a young California Highway Patrolman and I a toddler, he was assigned to the Highway Patrol office (yes, "office," not "barracks," as they have here in Massachusetts) in Barstow, smack in the middle of the Mojave Desert. I grew up with rattlesnakes and scorpions year round and triple-digit temperatures 9 months out of the year.
A local sergeant took my Dad under his wing and showed him the ropes. His name was Walt Terry. He was one of the original Highway Patrolmen when the CHP was organized from of the various county patrols in 1938. Walt Terry had also been a houseboy for Wyatt Earp and Josie in Hollywood in the '20's, helping the aging Wyatt in his decrepitude. That's how Terry got interested in law enforcement, or so he said.
Walt Terry had a long career. After retiring from the CHP, he finally retired for good as a San Bernardino County coroner sometime in the '70's when he was in his own '70's.
I vaguely remember a tanned guy with a trimmed mustache coming down the stairs in our little house in the desert. My Dad said Terry never talked about Wyatt Earp, except to say he kinda hero-worshipped him, and that Josie was extremely cheap. Of course, that's what you'd expect from the kid doing odd jobs.
But at least I have the bragging rights to say I once met someone who knew Wyatt Earp.
Excellent story. That's amazing, when you think about the span of history right there.
I watched Highway Patrol this morning - yeah, that's not the same thing...
I like "Unforgiven" especially Hackman and I agree the violence is realistic. But so much of the movie is 'Unrealistic'. In the old west anyone cutting up a prostitute -because they felt like it - would've wound-up at the end of a rope. Certain things just weren't done.
So, the whole 'Whores let out a bounty' was pretty silly. Side note:I never understood the whole fascination with Wyatt Earp.
My grandpa was a deputy sheriff and a hobby farmer (about an acre plus animals). He would have loved to been a vet, but he was the only boy in his family to not go off to WWII, so at home on the farm he would be.
Anyhow, he was a great and interesting man. Wouldn't let anyone plant flowers because, silly, you can't eat flowers.
You learned quickly to be suspicious of him waving something at end the of a fork at you and saying, "Try this!" I once asked what it was and he said, "Marsh rabbit." I learned later that's what the rest of the world calls muskrat.
One time I was bicycling down the old dirt road with my Grandma, and she stopped and said, "Oh, your grandpa would never forgive me if we didn't stop." There was a snapping turtle crossing the road, so she got off her bike, walked over and put her foot on its back. She told me to bike back to the house and tell Grandpa. I have never seen the man move so fast. We had turtle stew all that week.
Being a farmer, he couldn't bear to just throw away seeds that he might get, and as deputy sheriff, you can imagine interesting things occasionally got confiscated. So, he planted them. Apparently they got to be about five feet tall before Grandma insisted he cut them down and burn them in the garbage barrel.
When Grandpa finally died (R.I.P.), my brother hightailed it up there to their cabin as quick as he could. Apparently it was his job to dispose of the box of weird ass stuff that my Grandpa has confiscated and couldn't bear to just throw away before my Grandma found it. (Saturday night specials, switchblades, pipes and bongs, etc)
He would never ever use those things, but they were "perfectly good" and he couldn't bear to throw them away.
Depression-era thinking dies hard.
I once shook the hand of a man who shook the hand of JFK.
I'd generally agree with your assessment, except I don't think of Munny as a sociopath. Or if he is, he's got a kind of Dexter-style code that he follows fairly scrupulously. But I don't get the sense that he doesn't think people are real, but he doesn't view killing as a job different from any others.
His (deceased) wife is an interesting presence in the film, and he shows something like tenderness to the disfigured hooker. Obviously he doesn't think too much of most people.
And of course I loved "Deadwood".
But I grew up in the post-Western age. The only Western I saw in the theater as a kid was "Rooster Cogburn". Then there was another ten years before "Silverado".
I didn't really care for Westerns, just on principle. "Unforgiven" comes along and -- whoa...blows me away.
A few years back, a little after 2000, my dad and I went and saw a Western film series that covered movies from the '30s up to the late '60s. "Shane", "High Noon", "Searchers", "Johnny Guitar", "Man Who Shot Liberty Valance", ending with "The Professionals" and "Wild Bunch".
It was fun (and educational!), but you could sure see why the genre wasn't gonna survive the '60s.
It survived the sixties is just morphed into the urban crime dramas or movies like "The Warriors" or "Road Warrior."
I have to disagree with rc though. A lot of bad stuff happened to whores in the West. Sex workers were even more abused than they are now. "Deadwood" had it right. Al beat them and murdered them and generally abused the crap out of them. Cy Tolliver showed you how they were treated and Francis Walcott murdered them with impunity.
Miss Kitty was a convention not the reality.
True dat, Troop. Most of John Carpenter's movies are disguised westerns.
Tim,
I agree with your (deleted) comment.
I grew up in the era of "realism"—and about the only thing more bullshit than that is "reality TV". The quest for realism killed the musical and western, ruined sci-fi and fantasy, and gave us banal, seamy melodrama as "art".
A fun modern western is Sam Raimi's "The Quick and the Dead". Sharon Stone, Leo Di Caprio, Russell Crowe and (of course) Gene Hackman as the villainous town mayor/owner/whatever.
Complete artifice. Swooping cameras, funkeh angles, Stone as the Woman-With-No-Name.
The point of my story was the "span of history," as Sixty says. People may live long lives, as did Wyatt Earp, and find themselves in different worlds from those in which they once lived. The Western was already a literary genre when Wyatt Earp was a part of the real thing. Even though he survived into the cheap, easy and vastly different post-WWI world, Earp's talent of self-promotion continued to serve him well. He had long been in the business of making himself famous.
Trooper's point about the "tenor of the times" is important if you're talking about either history itself or historical fiction. And the Western genre by definition must include a dose of history.
But getting the tenor of the times right was never the idea of original Westerns, literary or film. They were pieces of American mythology about bringing order out of chaos. They were morality plays, more or less violent as suited a given story, but the white hats won in the end. Wyatt Earp, realizing this, made every effort to bleach his rather dingy one to suit the tale.
As in religion, the American story did not need facts to get in the way of truth. The truth was that Americans did settle a continent and, to their lights, brought order out of chaos. We are the beneficiaries of that to this day. Those are facts.
But, as we ceased believing in ourselves or our increasingly tattered civilization, the supporting myth became obsolete and embarrassing. In their decadence, the last myth-makers have turned to historical "accuracy" and/or brutal violence to portray the "real" thing.
Remembering the details, these story-tellers have forgotten the story, and are content to show us only glitter or vomit without life or poetry. The long-dead hero now lives in ghostly retirement, along with his deceased houseboy and phantasmal but still-chintzy wife. His boots and .45 are in a museum somewhere.
His place has been taken by another kind of hero—urban, gritty, often violent as any Western cowboy or sheriff, but without a hint of the sheriff's Victorian earnestness. The idea is still order out of chaos, but it's no longer played in a rural, national setting, but often block-by-block in a dark, decrepit city that could be anywhere. Or nowhere, which is the direction this particular myth may be taking us.
I won't delete the above to fix any more errors (sorry, blake), but I want to insert "also" into "Those are facts" to read "Those are also facts."
The facts and the truth share a lot in the American story. Not everything, but enough to have made it work.
Where do I start? Ok, first of all, having watched war movies, what bothered me most, and I say this as having been in combat, shot once, a wound that put me in the hospital for three months before I was well enough to get back to my unit, and then watching war movies, is the simple fact that war movies, have music playing, leading up the climatic scene. Ain't no music in combat. It's hard for me to relate to war movies. I understand why they do it, most people watching movies want entertainment and the scenes, combined with the music does it for them.
John Wayne just doesn't cut it with me. Most of those old war movies are shot as a scene on a stage.
You don't see the smoking brush, dust, burning grass, shattered trees on those scenes.
The only war movie that was close was Platoon. Except those soldiers were fuck ups. But that was what the the makers of the movie wanted to project
Platoon could've been a great movie, if not for the message. Which is true of a TON of movies and TV shows.
AllenS: I think it was ever thus with representations of war.
There was a short series on the BBC about 20 years ago, "I Remember Nelson," about Admiral Nelson from various points-of-view of people at the time. One of my faves included Nelson at the theatre, where his heroics were portrayed on stage. Nelson was in the audience, doing his best to play his public role, but obviously bemused (at best) at the sailors in a painted canvas ship on the moving, pasteboard waves. Britannia, in shining helm with lance and the Cross of St. George on her shield, steps forward and sings brilliant bel canto variations on "Rule Britannia" to the accompaniment of an orchestra with Beethoven-era instruments. As a musicologist, I can tell you this was perfectly done, as good a representation of what might have been seen and heard onstage in England ca. 1790 as it is possible to do.
The contrast was absolute between this and the scenes on a gun deck: The men standing to their 36-pounders firing in ranks, the frantic servicing of guns, the enemy balls crashing through, sending splinters and shards everywhere, a ball striking a barrel with a deadly clang, sending pieces of metal flying, breaking a trunion, dismounting the cannon , the multi-ton monster then rolling loose around the deck, the screams of men crushed or impaled or burnt, the salt water, the blood, the choking, blinding smoke—all this was equally accurately portrayed elsewhere in the series.
So the brave sailors and their heroic Captain, singing on a pasteboard sea to music by Haydn was something the English needed at the time for their own myth-making. They had to wait until the 20th century to see a bit of the reality behind it, although I'm sure people had some idea of the brutality needed to stop old Boney at the time. They just didn't want it in their faces at Covent Garden.
There is, or at least once was, a stump of a tree in the museum at Antietam battlefield.
That particular tree had been shot off about 4 feet above the ground, one Minié ball at a time until it was no more.
It stood in a museum, in a now-quiet place, in mute evidence of the horror that took place on that field that day - using single shot muzzle loaders soldiers had stood and shot until the trees themselves were laid low.
There were 23,000 casualties that day and I cannot imagine what it must have been like, almost 150 years ago.
Can a movie capture even a small portion of events such as that? I have my doubts.
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