ABSTRACT
The press reviews paved the way for the film’s opening success. Their general consensus was that Unforgiven is an unusual, “revisionist” western that reworks the traditional significations of the genre and, indeed, Eastwood’s own work in westerns (it bears comparison in many respects to High Plains Drifter particularly). But the most signal claims made by the reviewers for this film suggest that it is a complex and meaningful work whose artistic qualities tend to transcend its generic condition: the proposition is that Unforgiven constitutes a profound character study that carefully examines the moral issues of conscience and guilt in the context of the bloody ethos of the gunfighter or of the West in general. Perhaps the most convinced reviewer in this vein is Peter Travers in Rolling Stone, who concludes that this is the “most provocative western of Eastwood’s career…. Eastwood gives Unforgiven a tragic stature that puts his own filmmaking past in critical and moral perspective. In three decades of climbing into the saddle, Eastwood has never ridden so tall” (20 Aug. 1992, 5557). Other reviewers agree that the film exhibits these dimensions of moral investigation and critical self-reflexiveness —dimensions that, in the understanding of the tributary media, can elevate a film beyond mere generic status to the status of art. The film’s print advertisements in fact quote Rex Reed from the New York Observer, who apparently feels that Unforgiven is “a
profound work of art.” Even in the New Yorker, the magazine that has so often been the launching pad for Pauline Kael’s relentless assaults on Eastwood, the word is positive. The reviewer on this occasion, Michael Sragow, particularly admires the complexity of the characters and praises the performances of the male stars, and “this time Eastwood even does a good job directing Eastwood.” The review ends by noticing that Unforgiven is dedicated to Eastwood’s directorial mentors, Siegel and Leone, and suggests that Eastwood has honored them “by going his own way” (10 Aug. 1992, 70-71).
