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Some Kind of Hero
| Article
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10936 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1993 |
3,811 Words |
| Author
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John C. Tibbetts
John C. Tibbetts, an associate professor of theater and film
at the University of Kansas, contributes regularly to national
music publications and is editor of the recently published
Dvorak in America.
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As far as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has been concerned, Client Eastwood has been, like his character in the spaghetti westerns, "The Man with No Name." For nearly thirty-five years, he has been one of the most successful figures in the movies; yet, he has never earned so much as a single Oscar nomination.
That's changed. Racking up nine nominations, Unforgiven ultimately won the Oscar for Best Picture, as well as those for director (Eastwood) and Supporting Actor (Gene Hackman). In this writer's opinion, it deserved additional Oscars for Cinematography (Jack Green), Original Script (David Webb Peoples), and original Music Score (Lennie Niehaus)--a category for which it was not nominated.
The academy's imprimatur makes a respectable filmmaker of Eastwood, the scruffy maverick who helped fashion the violently antiheroic protagonists of the sixties and seventies. Ironically, Unforgiven, at first sight more of the same, seems hardly the sort of thing to please the academy's older majority. It is his most violent and edgy film to date, and his character ,the terrible William Munny, is his most unregenerate and vicious protagonist, a one-time "known thief and murder, a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition."
There is an attempted rape and vicious knife slashing of a woman's face. Elsewhere, a man is beaten and kicked to a pulp, another tortured to death, a third murdered in an out house. There's even a dime novelist on hand to observe the sleazy reality behind the legends he's been purveying. The "good guys" are bounty hunters who kill or money, and the "bad guy" is the sheriff. At the final showdown, Munny cold-bloodedly guns him down at point-blank range.
This horrific conclusion leaves audiences with neither the grateful release of tension, nor the satisfaction of a moral resolution, nor the sheer fun of kinetic action. Yet, something in the picture has clicked with everybody--it may be its tight and deceptively complex script, or its technical craftsmanship, or the star power of its cast. Or--and this is certainly a possibility--maybe it is time that we digest this ruthless portrait of the consequences of violence in the characters of the perpetrator.
When I interviewed Eastwood, it was clear that, from the beginning, he saw the movie as more than just another step in his career. "You know, violence has been glamorized since literature began," he said. "People have always tried to make the West
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