Aided by Jack N. Green's cinematography and Lennie Niehaus's music, Eastwood gives the film an ensemble portrait of sorrowful beauty...
Clint Eastwood shows another face of the Old West... He is perfect as the unforgiven, the stone killer, whose eyes are full of brutally painful memories...
Will Munny (Eastwood) is a retired bad man desperate for the 'whore's gold' to save his shabby farm, two kids, and sick animals in the vast emptiness of the Colorado range... Munny had a monogamous devotion to the wife he'd lost, and is forced to confront his own past no matters how he tries to avoid it...
Eastwood is supported by some quite outstanding character actors whose performances are impeccable:
Gene Hackman plays Little Bill Daggett, the town sadistic sheriff who rules with an iron fist, forbidding anyone to carry guns across the town limits... He is a lawman cold as ice, who hates "assassins and men of low character." He also despises reward-chasers and tries to humiliate them, revealing their cowardice and indecision... In his judgment, he declines to punish a crime in a way that the hookers consider appropriate...
Morgan Freeman plays Ned Logan, Munny's longtime honest partner, who ensures the compassionate balance that keeps his friend from sinking in a self-pitying haze of recklessness and bitterness, but he also launches Will into one of the bloodiest shootout in that untamed place...
Richard Harris is English Bob, the egotistical gunfighter who desires to leave the hospitality of Big Whiskey behind him... He now lives off his publicity, and is followed everywhere by W. W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), a writer of books, glamorizing the cover scene for purposes involving the market place...
Frances Fisher is Strawberry Alice, the outraged brothel's madam, who has raised, with a group of oppressed women she works with, a thousand dollars to anyone who punishes the two attackers who slash her working girl's face...
Jaimz Woolvett is Schofield Kid, the ignorant young rider who tries to make a name for himself... He shows up at Munny's place offering to split the reward, just for killing a couple of 'no good cowboys.'
Anthony James is Skinny Dubois, the owner of the bar and brothel, who pays good money for Delilah, and wants compensation...
Anna Thomson is the 'damaged property,' Delilah, the pretty prostitute whose disfiguration serves as the starting point for the story...
Nominated for nine Academy Awards and winning four major ones, "Unforgiven" becomes only the third Western ever to win the Best Picture Academy Award after "Cimarron" (1930/31) and "Dances with Wolves" (1990).
On screen, Eastwood dedicated the film to Sergio Leone and Don Siegel, his master directors and professional mentors...
