CLINT EASTWOOD'S THE UNFORGIVEN new restoration

[Chris Knipp]

25th Anniversary 4K restoration of Eastwood's Unforgiven coming this week.



News is out of the new 4K restoration of Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Oscar-winner (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor for Gene Hackman, and Best Film Editing), starring Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, Hackman, and Richard Harris (screenplay by Blade Runner, Ladyhawke and 12 Monkeys co-writer David Webb Peoples). DCP. It opens at Film Forum in New York in a "25th Anniversary Restoration" Friday, August 4 – Thursday, August 10, 2017.

Even if you can't be at Film Forum, watch the film and join a celebration and reassessment. It's available on HBO. Or get yourself a copy of it in Blu-ray or DVD.

At 62, Eastwood plays a beat up gunslinger at the tail end of the Wild West days, who has become an unsuccessful hog farmer and has two little kids he's raising alone. His Christian wife Claudia, who coaxed him into giving up alcohol and violence a decade before, has died. He leaves his kids and his hogs on their own for a couple weeks to raise money by slaying bad men who brutally beat and slashed a prostitute. Along the way he meets up with a nearsighted young would-be gunslinger with the made-up name "The Schofield Kid" (Jaimz Woolvett in a feature debut), an old partner (Morgan Freeman), and a badman turned sadistic sheriff (Gene Hackman), as well as a grandiose Englishman (Richard Harris) and the irate whores who put up the reward.

Most of these male stars are still around (not Harris) and are worth in excess of $50 million each; Hackman is worth over three times that. Eastwood has continued to direct and sometimes star in movies and has recently "I want to make movies till I'm 105." TUnforgiven was 25 years ago, but it is still one of his great milestones, perhaps his greatest. IT is signed "to Dan and Sergio", a homage to his mentors, SErgio Leone and Don Siegel, who has died three years ago and one year ago, respectively.

See Roger Ebert's enlightening description and summary of the film, which he calls an "elegy" for the Western that "reflects a passing era even in its visual style" and "works itself out in classic Western terms" and "The screenwriter, David Webb Peoples, ignores the recent tradition in which the expensive star dominates every scene, and creates a rich gallery of supporting roles," in which we observe "Eastwood as the master of the kind of sustained action sequence he learned from Leone and Siegel: Not a boring montage of quick cuts and meaningless violence, but a story told through deliberate strategy, in which events may not be possible, but are somehow plausible. "

Jonathan Rosenbaum: "As a moral reconsideration of the role of violence in previous Eastwood films, this is strong and sure, and characters who play against genre expectations give the film a provocative, smoldering aftertaste. The only limitation, really, is that the picture hasn’t much dramatic urgency apart from its revisionist context."