Tuesday, July 10, 2012

So Good Metallica Wrote a Song about It

Unforgiven
                This seems like not only a somewhat standard plot for Clint Eastwood western movies, but also a standard plot for westerns in general.  Our opening scene is the brutal maiming of a prostitute and the only sort of action taken as punishment is those responsible get fined.    So this kid- who I always just think of as “kid”, you know like in Dick Tracy- goes out and hires Will Munny, who was once the baddest man in all of the west.  
                Will manages to recruit his former partner, Ned (Morgan Freeman) and then after some obvious fighting the three begin their quest to kill the men who cut up a lady.   
                What first struck me funny about this movie is the way the game telephone comes into play.   When the kid tells Will, and then Will tells Ned, it seems like the details of just how badly this woman was cut up get worse and worse.   What’s even more so is that it seems to be less played upon the fact that she is a prostitute.   I’m not saying prostitutes are less than human, but in Detroit if a whore got cut no one would flinch.                  
                Toward the end of the movie, as Will and the kid have managed to kill off everyone except Gene Hackman, we find out that Ned has died.   This actually made me really sad and I wish it wasn’t a part of this movie.   It gave Will Munny this very clear vengeance to go through and shoot everyone and anyone who got in his way, sure, but we never actually got to see any sort of closure on the subject.   For all of the pain and torment that Will Munny’s character goes through during the course of this movie, you would have to imagine that the worst of it comes when he tells Ned’s widow the news. 

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