#unforgiven movie

[jeandejard3n]

Unforgiven Ambient Music

[jentlemahae]

POSTERS FOR AESPA'S HORROR MOVIE "UNHAPPY"

[haveyouseenthismovie-poll]

[soulrestinginstpetersburg]

Yall dont realise how bad I am about Clint Eastwood. That man got me drooling.

[audreyhepburninblackandwhite]

Audrey Hepburn during the production of The Unforgiven Durango, Mexico 1959

[aliveandfullofjoy]

Review: Unforgiven (Eastwood, 1992)

(I haven't posted a review on Tumblr in a hot minute -- I've been keeping those to Letterboxd -- but I tried to get a few words out about this movie and wanted to share here as well. I love it a lot. Those are always hard to write about for me. This is embarrassing. Thanks for reading. Or not! Consider watching Unforgiven if you haven't!)

"It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have."

Unforgiven is just one of those movies for me. It hits me like a bolt of lightning every time I watch it. I first watched it when I was in high school, when I was first getting into movies by way of poring over Oscar history. I didn't think of myself as a westerns guy at the time -- I'm honestly not even sure how many I'd seen by that point -- but Unforgiven almost immediately made me fall in love with the genre as a whole. It was a little bit like discovering my first Stephen Sondheim musical: "Oh, that's what this can be?"

Admittedly, I've been way less rabid about consuming westerns than I have been with musical theatre (and I'm certainly not a Clint Eastwood megafan). Still, it's a genre I find endlessly fascinating, and it's almost entirely because of how deeply literary they often feel. More than any other genre, individual characters in westerns seem to represent so much more than just themselves. I'm sure there's a great thesis to be written about the ideologies represented in Unforgiven in just the characters of William Munny and Little Bill Daggett alone, to say nothing of Ned Logan or the Schofield Kid or Strawberry Alice or English Bob or W. W. Beauchamp or Delilah.

(My God, what a cast of characters. What a script.)

And then there's the beautiful prologue and epilogue, perfectly bookending the film -- the cruelty, the loss, the violence -- with a bittersweet sense of poetry. Maybe cinema was invented so Eastwood could match Jack N. Green's cinematography with David Webb Peoples' words and accompany them with an aching guitar (the gorgeous "Claudia's Theme," which Eastwood wrote himself). All I have to do is think about the final words of the epilogue, to visualize Mrs. Ansonia Feathers visiting her daughter's grave, and I feel my eyes begin to well up.

I think that love story is what keeps me coming back to Unforgiven. We never see Munny's wife, just like we never see Munny before his marriage, that "man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition." To us, he's just a widower -- an aging man with a surprising gentleness who can barely take care of his hogs. Eastwood, it should be said, gives a gorgeous performance.

I love everything about this movie, even the parts that make me feel queasy. I love the Munny/Ned dynamic (Morgan Freeman is great in his short screen time). I love how vile of a bad guy Little Bill is (Gene Hackman's second Oscar was well-earned). I love getting heady about it and thinking about it as a deconstruction and an elegy for the westerns of Eastwood's youth. I even love how almost fatalistic the film gets near the end ("I'll see you in Hell." "Yeah.").

But it's the entirely offscreen love story that lingers with me. On this watch, the following exchange Munny has with Delilah, the brutalized sex worker at the center of Unforgiven's conflict, caught me completely off-guard and made me start crying almost immediately. Munny's wife, a woman we never meet, is a symbol of hope and redemption in a vicious world. Their love for one another is the heart of the film.

"Is she back in Kansas?" "Yeah, she's watching over my young ones."

[nellarw95]

Happy Birthday Clint 🥳🎂🎈🎁🎉

Clinton Eastwood Jr

May 31,1930

Buon Compleanno 🥳🎂🎈🎁🎉

31 Maggio 1930

[omercifulheaves]

Unforgiven (1992)

[cinemajunkie70]

A very happy birthday to Gene Hackman!

[meatmensch]

I'm never not thinking about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as well as Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head btw

[puppygirlboyfriend]

William Munny call him Dollar Bill

[specrapular]

A gritty old man comes out of retirement for one more job. While a brother must climb Mount Everest to save his foolish sister from eminent death.

[audreyhepburninblackandwhite]

Audrey Hepburn in The Unforgiven (1960)

[pricelesscinemas]

[cloud3francois]

Unforgiven: How did Little Bill know?

[amechyofsorts]

Favorite movies, for archival purposes, in no particular order:

The Wild Bunch

Unforgiven

Dredd

L.A. Confidental

Falling Down

Jackie Brown

Raging Bull

Amadeus

Ran

Aguirre The Wrath of God