One of the Best Westerns of All Time Is on Netflix
Long before there were superheros, there were cowboys. While in 2018 it might feel like every other movie features a person in tights with magic powers, Westerns used to be even more unavoidable. It’s been estimated that as many as 40% of all Hollywood films before 1960 featured bandanas, bandits, and six-shooters. The genre started to fade in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and then in the early ‘90s Clint Eastwood—star of a score of classic Westerns like High Plains Drifter and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly—set out to “bury the Western” with Unforgiven. In the process of killing off the genre, Eastwood made one of the greatest classic Westerns of all time.
Unforgiven opens with Eastwood’s William Munny burying his wife outlined against a burning sunset. Scrolling text telling us he is “a known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition.” In short, he’s a classic Wild West badass. Except when we actually meet him, he’s falling in a pile of mud while chasing pigs. “You don't look like no rootin-tootin son of a bitch cold blooded assassin,” the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) says.
The Kid has come to recruit Munny on a job: murdering a cowboy and his friend who disfigured a prostitute for laughing at the size of his pecker. (As Margaret Atwood once said, “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”) Sheriff Little Bill, Gene Hackman in an Oscar-winning performance, decided the cowboys could pay the brothel owner a few horses. The prostitutes were understandably not satisfied with that. “Just because we let them smelly fools ride us like horses don’t mean we gotta let them brand us like horses,” Strawberry Alice (Frances Fisher) says. The women pooled their money to offer a reward to anyone who will murder their attackers. Munny is reluctant at first, but soon brings his retired partner Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) along and the three agree to split the reward.
Unforgiven has all the pieces of a traditional Western—a quick-drawing sheriff, gun-toting outlaws, a quest for money and vengeance—but the script expertly deconstructs the genre at the same time it homages it. Westerns are all about their own mythology, and the characters in Unforgiven are either actively trying to shape their own legends or destroy them. In an unforgettable supporting role, Richard Harris plays English Bob, a British gunslinger who arrives in town toting his own biographer. When Little Bill beats English Bob up to stop him from collecting the ransom, the biographer jumps ship to Bill’s team and starts writing down Bill’s exaggerate tales.
On the other hand, Ned Logan and William Munny are tired and old. They can barely remember what legends of theirs are true and which are false. Killing isn’t heroic to them anymore. Now, it’s a dark and sad act. “It's a hell of a thing, killin' a man. You take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have,” Munny says when the Kid takes his first life. And while it’s probably too much to call Unforgiven a feminist film (all the leads are men after all), the movie interrogates the Western genre’s toxic masculinity and the female characters are about the only ones you can truly root for.
Unforgiven came out 26 years ago, and went on to win Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Editing in addition to Hackman’s Best Supporting Actor. In the quarter century since more Westerns have been made. It didn’t truly kill off the genre. But it changed it. Recent “Westerns” like No Country For Old Men, Brokeback Mountain, or Django Unchained have continued the tradition of critiquing and reinventing the Western mythology. Unforgiven managed to perfectly homage and destroy the classic Western film. There hasn’t been a movie like it since.
