Unforgiven

What’s the Story?

When a prostitute is brutally slashed in the face and badly scarred, her assailants are discharged without fitting punishment. To avenge their friend, her co-workers offer $1000 reward to anyone willing to kill the attackers. William Munny (Clint Eastwood), a retired outlaw/killer who's trying to go straight and make ends meet for his children on a ramshackle hog farm, joins with his old partner Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) and The Scofield Kid, a young braggart, as they head for Big Whiskey, Wyoming to kill the slashers and split the reward. But Sheriff Little Bill Taggart (Gene Hackman) runs a tightly-controlled town. The citizens fear their sheriff even as they respect his authority. Munny and his accomplices arrive and the forces of good and evil collide as justice is sought. But which force is good and which is evil? And, is there purity in either?

Is It Any Good?

Clint Eastwood's career as a filmmaker and director soared with the release of this movie. Winning Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director, among others, UNFORGIVEN offers an original, thought-provoking, and gritty look at the true nature of violence, morality, and justice. Heroes are flawed; villains are complex. The act of taking a life has seldom been examined in action movies and Westerns. In this one, the consequences of that act override the deed itself: "Killing a man... it don't seem real... how he ain't gonna never breathe again, ever." And, "it's a hell of a thing, killing a man -- you take away all he's got, all he's ever gonna have."

Screenplay, performances, direction, cinematography, and music combine to create a different kind of Western, one that made a significant change in an All-American genre.