Intense frontier drama
The Unforgiven is very, very
good. It is a marvelously written, intense psychological Western with
fascinating characters, splendid acting, fine photography and stirring action.
The film ranks with The Searchers as a study of racial
hatred and also reminds us of the excellent Flaming Star in its subject matter. Even the ‘good’ white people have an almost
deranged loathing of the Kiowa. The very sight of one is enough to cause
hysteria among the settlers. This is racialism on a passionate scale. We do
not, however, see enough brutality of the Kiowa towards the whites to justify
this almost insane hatred. If we had, it might have given a more nuanced
picture. The two-dimensional Indians do slightly undermine the anti-racist
message.
Yes, well...
John Huston directed, acted in
and/or wrote eight Westerns or semi-Westerns, notably The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in 1948. The Unforgiven was probably his second-best example of the genre. It
was written by Ben Maddow (The Man from Colorado, Johnny Guitar) from a novel
by Alan Le May, writer of some successful Westerns like San Antonio, The Walking Hills, High Lonesome and, of course, The Searchers.
The book
The story tells of three
brothers in a Texas-Panhandle family of settlers who discover, to their shock,
that their adopted sister is a Kiowa Indian.
The members of the Zachary clan
are wonderfully well played. Burt Lancaster is magisterial as Ben, the head of
the family. What a fine actor he was at times. Yes, he could ham it up and he was in
some Westerns which were average at best or even poor (Apache, Vera Cruz, Lawman, even The Hallelujah Trail, God help us) but he was magnificent with the right
part. One thinks of Vengeance Valley,
Valdez Is Coming or Ulzana’s Raid. But The Unforgiven was probably his finest Western movie.
The Zacharys: Doug, Burt, Audie, Audrey
Similarly, Audie Murphy as Ben’s
Indian-hating younger brother Cash was never better, except perhaps in The Red Badge of Courage (also directed
by Huston). Murphy made a long series of conventional B-Westerns which had
highish production values but were never really 'art'. In The Unforgiven, however, he is powerful, weighty and strong, a
serious actor of considerable ability.
The youngest brother, Andy, is
played by Doug McClure. The Unforgiven
was really the launch pad of his Western career. After a micropart as a
soldier, almost an extra, in Friendly
Persuasion (barely a Western at all), he had appeared in a fair number of TV Westerns in the late
1950s before this, this, his first major role. From 1962 to 1971 he was of course
famous as Trampas in The Virginian (I
remember my mother thought he was very handsome). He was good as Sam in Shenandoah but really we think of him as
a TV star. In The Unforgiven he plays
the green teenage son with commendable enthusiasm, although he was in his
mid-20s.
Lillian Gish, 67, is superb as
the boys’ mother, Mattilda. As you probably know, she had starred in three
early silent Westerns, including The Battle of Elderbush Gulch in 1913, and in the powerful Victor Sjöström-directed
The Wind in 1928. She was also one of
the McCanles clan in Duel in the Sun
in 1946. But The Unforgiven was her
first Western since and was her last. As a tender, tough frontier mother who is
still violent enough to lash the horse away from under a man waiting to be
lynched, she is magnificent.
Only Audrey Hepburn is wrong –
miscast - as the adopted sister, Rachel. She is too delicate, too sweet (and
really too posh) to be a frontier-raised Indian foundling.
Hepburn miscast
For the rest, we have Charles
Bickford very good indeed (once again, this was probably the best Western of
the 20 he did) as the disabled Zeb, head of the Rawlins family. John Saxon is
also fine as Johnny Portugal, the Indian or half-breed cowhand, seen as an ‘enemy’
in the white ranks yet more or less tolerated – and what a good rider he was.
It was his first Western.
Wiseman as Death
And Canadian Joseph Wiseman, the icy Fernando Aguirre
from Viva Zapata!, has the wonderful
part of the ghostly Abe Kelsey who causes all the trouble. He appears on a pale
horse and is, of course, Death. Perhaps Clint Eastwood, director of Unforgiven in 1992, was quoting The Unforgiven in his 1985 Pale Rider.
Charles Bickford, excellent
The acting is really top class.
The film is intense,
occasionally earthily bucolic, and frontier-authentic. It starts with a very classical
allusion: the Odyssey-like cow-on-the-roof at the start is amusing and harmless
and sets the happy-family tone, but the image comes back to haunt the Zacharys in a far more menacing way at the
end of the movie. There are other striking images, such as the playing of
Mozart on the wild prairie, or Zeb Rawlins’s crutches made from rifle stocks or
the melting down of lead soldiers for bullets. Skeins of flying geese symbolize freedom.
The Dimitri Tiomkin music is
grand, even grandiloquent, symphonic, impressive. The Franz Planer photography
is often dark, always high-quality and very striking. He only shot two Westerns,
this and The Big Country.
The Unforgiven is a big, two-hour,
color Western and it came out the same year as the commercial movie that
indicated the future of the genre in the coming decade, The Magnificent Seven, but it harks back to the classic tradition
of 1950s Westerns more than looking forward to the next generation. It is no
worse for that, however.
Apparently, John Huston and Burt
Lancaster had considerable disagreements over the film. Lancaster produced it
and his company was aiming at big box-office, whereas Huston was perhaps
looking for something more. Huston distanced himself from the finished product
and in fact claimed that "of all
his films, The Unforgiven was the
only one he actually disliked." That seems strange to us, given the
quality of the picture, because The
Unforgiven is one of the great Westerns.
No comments:
Post a Comment