Straight talking, unnerving grit. Like all good westerns the set up is so tightly wound the climax is like a bullet in the head. Nothing should be taken away from perhaps Eastwood's greatest film due to his masterful grip of the genre because the film in question is a great film, full stop. Unforgiven is a remorseful western that plays on conscience stronger than gun powder. The consequence of every action presented, at the start and throughout, has resolution by the finale and no man that kills another is left without his punishment. This is except our family man Munny who carries the weight of his past crimes like chains. Eastwood's performance is subtle but weighted and his brooding intensity is in full force, conveying a strong sense of outward regret. Hackman's blind-sighted antagonist and his skewed sense of justice are well played and there is a slight sense that the environment him and his men are stuck in has made them as such. Repressed the women are out for as much justice as the men and even though it's their hands that result in most of the deaths in Big Wiskey, the impression lingers that after all the blood shed, poor Fitzgerald and her fellow hookers no longer felt the same way. Perhaps Eastwood after his long cinematic history of playing uninvited strangers who cause havoc in small towns is like Munny feeling the strain. Unforgiven may be the title but here is a film that should be seen as a call for forgiveness that is up to us, the admirer of cinema, to bestow.
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