Top Westerns: 4. Unforgiven

08 July 2008

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At number four in our top Western's countdown if Clint Eastwood's 1992 release Unforgiven, as well as being considered a classic of the genre the film also revitalised the Western which had seen it's popularity fade.

Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman play retired, down-on-their-luck outlaws who pick up their guns one last time to collect a bounty offered by the vengeful prostitutes of the remote Wyoming town of Big Whiskey.

Disgusted by the punishment of losing several ponies dealt out by Sheriff "Little Bill" Daggett to a cowboy who had slashed the face of a prostitute Big Whiskey prostitutes, led by fierce Strawberry Alice (Frances Fisher), take justice into their own hands and put a 1000 bounty on the lives of the perpetrators.

Gunslinger the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett)turns to notorious outlaw William Munny (Eastwood) to go and collect the bounty, but Munny left that life behind for the sake of his late wife.

But Munny's financial struggle forces him to re-think and the pair convince clean-living friend Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) to go along with them.

But Sheriff little Bill has no intention of letting the outlaws disrupt the law of his town and Munny must contend with his new moral code in the face of revisiting the life he left behind.

Dedicated to Eastwood's former directors and mentors Don Siegel and Sergio Leone, who he worked with on the likes of The Good the Bad and the Ugly, as the film was a hit with the critics and did well at the box office.

The film went on to win Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Hackman) and Best Film Editing at the Oscars and is still one of few Westerns to be inducted into the United States National Film Registry.

Today Unforgiven is still considered one of the greatest film's in it's genre, ironically produced years after the Western's hayday of the fifties and sixties.

Unforgiven shatters every myth of the Old West showing it as a hard brutal place where no one dies easily or quietly instead it's a world of killing and a vicious cycle of revenge.

FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw

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