It’s been a long time since we talked movies.
Our film society continues to view and review the Oscar-winning Best Pictures. We last left you at #64, “Silence of the Lambs,” with Hannibal the Cannibal, a particularly scarey person in a particularly frightening film. That was 1991.
Let’s move on.
The next Best Picture, #65 in 1992, is perhaps just as dark, in its own ways, as #64 was in its time.
Picture a Small Cowboy Town in the West when the West was Wild. A girl offends a boy with a casual remark. The boy does not forgive the girl and hurts her bad. The girl’s friends do not forgive the boy, and they hire some gunmen to hurt the boy and his friend even worse. The gunmen hurt the boys badder still. The townspeople do not forgive the gunmen, and they hurt one gunman even more worse, baddest yet. The remaining gunman does not forgive the town for hurting his friend, and he proceeds to really hurt the Sheriff and the townspeople, even more worser and badester than ever before. Then, that last Unforgiven person, the notorious gunman William Mundy out of Missouri, played by Clint Eastwood out of California, rides out of that town into the dark and rain leaving behind this threat:
“All right, I’m coming out. Any man I see out there, I’m gonna shoot him. Any(body) . . . takes a shot at me, I’m not only gonna kill him, but I’m gonna kill his wife, all his friends, and burn his . . . house down.”
That’s unforgiveness on steroids, with no one willing to break the cycle; and everyone is unforgiven, to the very last man, Clint “Mundy” Eastwood, in his very last Western movie.
It takes a while to recover from something like that.
The natural tendency is, I think, to say, “I’m sorry,” or a similar attempt, or maybe just to hide until it’s all over.
Okay, now let’s see how our ethnofamilymovieography group of viewers commented on and reviewed this film. Ta Da!!!! The summary sentence is:
“Unforgiven” has four things to its credit: Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman and the scenery, and two things not easily seen: the violence and killing; this is “Classic Eastwood” with “the killing everyone;” Western opera at its best and worst, the bodies are strewn on the barroom floor at show’s end; bad people killing badder people and vice versa, and none of them really good, except the acting and filmmaking, to wit: Best Picture and Best Director to Eastwood (who almost got Best Actor, to boot), Best Supporting Actor to Hackman (who liked to use his boots), and Best Film Editing (thankfully some scenes were booted) — the beautifully shot violence of the West with sweeping vistas framing the grimaced moral that: “Bad is bad and may not get much better”; all of which provides little comfort and did not comfort our showtime movie audience, who managed to award the film only a 7.10 of 10, placing Clint and the gang at #49 of the first 65 Best Pictures; perhaps it may be said of the film, as Eastwood says at the end as he pulls the final trigger, “Deserves has got nothing to do with it.”
Perhaps the movie did not fare so well with our audience (in the bottom third), but I will say this, however, that on re-seeing the picture, I saw a strong show, a firm film, with a sound moral message, a message I think I’d missed before. I, like the rest of the timid watchers, was waiting and wishing that someone would stand up and simply say, “I’m sorry.” Maybe that’s the positive moral, the real message of the movie:
Don’t wait, don’t wait to say you’re sorry. If you do you may wake up in Big Whiskey, Wyoming, in the rain, in the wet dark rain. You look up through the heavy drops of moisture dripping off your Cowboy hat and see Bill Mundy riding back into town down the street with that Spencer rifle cradled in his arms. Then I bet you’d wish you’d said, “I’m sorry.”
I guess you have to forgive first or you may end up Unforgiven and back in that same dream in the sequel you never wanted to see or be a part of.
Or you may just move on to the next movie.
Which we will do again soon.
In time — stay tuned.
This took time.
I’m sorry.
Grandpa Jim