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Cinema

Unforgiven

Clint Eastwood · 1992

Synopsis

Big Whiskey, Wyoming, 1880. A cowboy slashes the face of the prostitute Delilah; Sheriff Little Bill Daggett merely makes the two cowboys hand over ponies to the saloon-keeper, and the prostitutes put together a thousand-dollar bounty for their deaths. In Kansas, a young man who calls himself the Schofield Kid comes to propose the job to William Munny, a widowed former outlaw raising two children alone on a struggling pig farm. Munny refuses, changes his mind, goes to fetch his old partner Ned Logan, and the two join the Kid, heading for a town where firearms are forbidden.

Context

The screenplay, written in 1976 under another title, went fifteen years without being filmed: Francis Ford Coppola held the option without finding financing, then Eastwood acquired it and set the text aside, partly to be the age of the character. He shot it in 1991, at sixty-one, as the fourth western he directed. The closing credits end with a dedication to Sergio Leone and Don Siegel, who had directed him, the former in three films and the latter in five.

Who it is for

A two-hour-ten-minute film that takes up the motifs of the western: the bounty, revenge and the legend of the gunman.

Prizes and reception

Four Oscars from nine nominations in 1993, including best film, and nearly one hundred and sixty million dollars at the box office on a budget of about fourteen.

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