UNFORGIVEN - DVD review

My favorite Clint Eastwood Western remains "The Outlaw Josey Wales," but I can't argue that "Unforgiven," Eastwood's 1992 Academy Award-winner, isn't close behind and among the two or three last great Westerns Hollywood has produced.

"Unforgiven" is producer-director-star Eastwood's and writer David Webb People's attempt to demytholigize the Western, to present the Old West on film as something closer to what it might really have been. Thus, you will find no heroes here, nor any true villains.

The main character, played by Eastwood, is William Munny, a widower with two small children, living off the land in a little mud hole in the middle of the Kansas plains. But it wasn't always so with Munny. Some ten years earlier, he was a "rootin', tootin' son-of-a-bitchin', cold-blooded assassin," a drunkard, a thief, and a murderer by his own admission. But he found a new life in the bosom of a good woman who showed him the error of his ways and set him on a new and sober course before succumbing to smallpox on their prairie farm.

Now, life is tougher for Munny than ever before, and when a young gunslinger, the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett), comes by offering to share a thousand-dollar reward with him if he'll help him kill a pair of cowboys, Munny goes for it. But Munny insists he's a changed man, reformed, and is only doing the killing for the money; not like the old days when he would do it for the pleasure. And Munny is especially persuaded to do the job when the Kid explains that the cowboys they're going after cut up a defenseless prostitute, and her fellow harlots are putting up the reward for the perpetrators' deaths because the law would do nothing to help them.

Munny hasn't been on a horse in years and can hardly handle a gun anymore, but that doesn't stop him. He needs the cash. More important, he sees the killing of these miscreants as a kind of redemption for him, a distorted good deed for a life of iniquity. He hooks up with an old pal from his outlaw past, Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), who has also forsaken the gun and turned to farming, and together the three men ride out like avenging angels, or knights errant, to right the wrongs of a harsh and uncaring world.

But, as I said, life is tough for Munny, and things are not so simple as their merely shooting two men dead and collecting their money. The two cowboys they're after are holed up on a ranch just outside a little town whose sheriff, Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman), is a strict law-and-order man, a guy who believes that any means are worth the end. Daggett is a bully and coward who commands respect with the help of a passel of deputies and guns and administers his own brand of justice once he disarms a man. Little Bill isn't about to have any bloodshed in or around his town.

Along the way we also meet a writer, W.W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), an Easterner come West to find grist for new dime novels. He's looking for gun-toting heroes, and if can't find them, he creates them. Lately, he's spinning yarns around a British fop of a gunslinger who calls himself English Bob (Richard Harris). Yet nothing is as it seems.

The movie depicts the West as a largely dirty, brutal place, at least the areas inhabited by Man, with the movie's characters all ordinary people with ordinary weaknesses. Munny himself is neither a good bad man nor a bad good man; he's simply a man. This is the deglamorized version of "Shane," where not the fastest draw but the calmest demeanor and the steadiest hand wins the gun battle. Likewise, Sheriff Daggett is no common heavy; instead, we see a person who truly believes in what he's doing to keep the peace, no matter how violent it may seem to us. It's been said the movie also displays themes of antiviolence and women's lib, but these are only peripheral issues in a story that basically tries to proffer a different slant on a traditional genre.

Yet for all its attempts at debunking the conventional Hollywood Western, "Unforgiven" remains an orthodox example of the breed. It maintains Hollywood's strict "Code of the West," where courage and loyalty reign supreme and the protagonist faces off with the antagonist in one big, final showdown. William Munny may be older and more grizzled than Eastwood's seminal Western hero of thirty years before, but, make no mistake, underneath it all he's still Sergeo Leone's "Man With No Name."

The movie's cinematography is also done up in the grand Western style, with gorgeous background scenery and vast, open vistas to ponder. The leadoff shot of Munny's little cabin silhouetted on the prairie against a setting sun is itself worthy of pausing to meditate over for a while, as is the fine, simple musical score by Lennie Niehaus.

Video:
The picture, presented in an approximate 2.10:1 ratio anamorphic widescreen, is excellent, very dark-toned but clean, and clear. Background shots and scenery are rendered realistically, yet the film's more unsympathetic angles are well captured by the transfer, too, things like dusty trails and smoky barrooms. The new mastering is free of most defects, minor line jitters the only visible defects. Colors are well set off by the solid blacks around them, providing a reasonably natural, three-dimensional appearance.

Audio:
The Dolby Digital 5.1 sound offers fine surround characteristics from the very opening of the movie, rain falling everywhere around the viewing area. The wide frequency range produces a strong, deep bass and even stronger transient impact. It's a pleasure to listen to the sounds of horses' hooves, birds' twitters, and distant rolls of thunder rendered so realistically. While the rear channels may not represent the ultimate in pinpoint accuracy, they accomplish their job of enveloping the audience in the aural environment of the times.

Extras:
"Unforgiven" leads a sudden splurge of Warner Bros. two-disc special edition sets, and the bonuses are a pretty impressive lot. Disc one contains the widescreen presentation of the movie with its Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack, plus an audio commentary with film critic and Eastwood biographer Richard Schickel; some informational text on Eastwood's Westerns called "Eastwood Out West"; a list of awards the film won; thirty-three scene selections; and a theatrical trailer. English and French are provided for spoken languages, with English, French, and Spanish for subtitles.

Disc two contains the bulk of supplemental material: four documentaries and a television show. The best of them is a newly made, twenty-two minute documentary, "All on Accounta Pullin' a Trigger," that features comments by Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman, and various crew members. The second documentary, "Eastwood & Co.: Making Unforgiven," twenty-three minutes and narrated by Hal Holbrook, was made at the time of the film's shooting in 1992 and seems more PR hype than the previous documentary. The third one, "Eastwood...A Star," is sixteen minutes and chronicles the star's career, while the fourth documentary, "Eastwood on Eastwood," is a one-hour examination of the man's life, career, and outlook on filmmaking. The second disc concludes with a classic, James Garner "Maverick" episode from 1959, "Duel at Sundown," that features a young Eastwood in a supporting role. These extras include a good deal of information to absorb at one sitting, so I recommend going at it slowly.

Parting Thoughts:
"Unforgiven" is a delicate yet brutal balance of real West versus reel West. If this seems contradictory, remember that the movie never strays too far in either direction to distract us from its primary purpose, which is to entertain. It's no wonder it made more money than any previous Eastwood Western and won the ton of Oscars it did, like Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Gene Hackman), and Best Film Editing (Joel Cox).

Appropriate to its gritty purpose, the movie is rated R for vulgar language, violence, and sexual situations. Warner Bros. have done a worthy job in decking it out handsomely on this new Special Edition DVD set. It's one heck of a good film that deserves the best.