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The conversation usually goes like this: Somebody asks whether I've seen any good movies lately and I say Unforgiven is the best movie of the year. "Oh, terrific, I like Clint Eastwood." I say yes I do too, but that isn't what I mean, this is the first great Western since Sam Peckinpath's Pat Garret and Billy the Kid. "Glad to her it, I really like Westerns." Then I say yes, me too, but that's not it either--Unforgiven is a GREAT FILM. "Oh ... no kidding?"
Has David Webb People's script been lying around, as I've heard, for 17 years? If so, why? And if so, thank whatever Music rides herd on the history of the cinema. Sometimes turnaround is safe haven. Filmed in the Seventies, People's screenplay might well have yielded just another hysterical "revisionist Western" of the day (concidentally, Gene Hackman was the bad guy in one of the most hihilistic and repellent of the breed, The Hunting Party). It wasn't filmed then, wasn't bought by Eastwood till after Peoples had his name on Blade Runner, in 1982. The tide changed, from The Cut Whore Killings to The William Munny Killings, then, a few months prior to the film's release, Unforgiven. Did the script change, too? Is the script Peoples wrote the same script that was filmed? The screenplay we "read" in watching the movie is a beauty, strong and clean of fine, respectful of character, attentive to the fullness of time and the wholeness and inexorability of space. Is Unforgiven Clint Eastwood's best film as a director because he had the best script of his career? Or is it Eastwood's direction that we "read"?
A box-office phenom since the late Sixties, Eastwood also had long enjoyed the regard of critics for being a popular filmmaker as complicated as he is proficient. They're intrigued by his sly sense of humor--about his stellar eminence and the sometime preposterousness of "action" in action movies--and even more by his fascinating admixture of political correctness (no-sweat racial egalitarianism. "Hollywood's foremost feminist director") and incorrectness (lethal weapons. Republicanism, Grenade). Above all, he has compelled respect for willingness, unparalleled among superstars, to risk big: as star and icon--most notably, in Bronco Billy, Honkytonk Man, the cop sexual-psychodrama diptych Tightrope...