Review of Unforgiven (1992) by Kurt F — 13 May 2013

Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven won the Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture in 1993. Some might say it was a lifetime achievment sort of award night for Clint Eastwood, a legend in Hollywood for all the right reasons.

It was the best movie of the year. A modern take on the classic Western. Clint as an aged version of The Man with No Name and Gene Hackman as what I consider to be a 20th century police chief in the Wild West.

Eastwood dominates the poster, but I fell the movie belongs as much to Gene Hackman. Hackman's Little Bill is a lawman who's braved the toughest towns and then settled down in a tiny Wyoming town to live out the rest of his days in peace.

But then some bounty hunters wander into town and inadvertanly try to change that. Throughout the film you see Little Bill as a normal, kind man. Except when he's called to action. He might be considered a villain of the film, but look at his 'victims'.

The only people he hurts are reputed killers. In my opinion he in the right even when brutally killing some of them. Clint Eastwood's William Munny was actually a raving psychopath to rival The Joker in his day.

He may act like a poor old man, but deep down he's the worst villain of the West. The way Eastwood shifts our opinions on the characters from the beginning of the film to end is why this is his finest film.

Our hero turns out to be a villain and our villain turns out to be... just a cop doing his job. Gene Hackman won several awards for his performance including the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor and it's well-deserved.

And Eastwood won just about every award a director/producer can win for making a movie, also well-deserved. Clint Eastwood made his final Western with this movie in 1992, a perfect swanson to a career in a genre he changed forever.

A true classic.