vincentlynch-moonoi
The first part of the mess that I noticed is the score. Terrible. It seems to have nothing to do with the film at all. Sort of like someone said, "We have to have background music," so they found an old record and slapped it in. And I don't know how to explain it since it is Dimitri Tiompkin responsible for it. The score was recorded in Italy and also just sounds flat.Then there's the first 1 hour and ten minutes (give or take) of the film. A waste of celluloid which will pretty much lead you to dislike almost every character in the film.Finally, with the film more than half over, beginning with the segment leading up to and including the hanging, things get quite a bit better. Until the conclusion. The ending sort of leaves us hanging. What is going to happen now with the family? One big happy family, or will the realization that the daughter is actually a Kiowa Indian lead to disintegration of the family? If they stay together, do they have to leave their home since all the surrounding Whites now hate them? In a sense, those story lines are potentially more interesting than what was covered in the film.So what was left to like? Not much. Perhaps SOME of the acting. Burt Lancaster was strong as the father-figure in the film; he was also involved in the production of the film. Audrey Hepburn seems an odd choice for the girl who is thought to be white, but is actually Kiowa...even with some darkening makeup she just doesn't look the part at all (remember, she is not a half-breed, but rather full-Indian), though her acting is fine. Audie Murphy is terrible here as one of the brothers of Lancaster; Murphy was a decent actor...but not here. John Saxon played an Indian, but pretty much just seems to disappear after a while. Charles Bickford has a decent role as another rancher who is quite gruff, but this is not one of his more impressive performances...though that is more the fault of the direction than him as an actor. It's interesting to see the famous Lillian Gish as the mother, and it is a substantial role...though not particularly impressive. Perhaps it's because of later roles in which I remember him, but Albert Salmi in his role as a family member seems unbelievable. But if there's one role and actor that proves the poor direction, it's young Doug McClure. In the first half of the film I thought he was playing a mildly mentally retarded "son"; in the second half of the film we realize he's just naive.And to me, all the lousy aspects of this film come down to the director -- John Huston. John Huston had about 8 really great films to his credit as a director, other run-of-the-mill films, and a few that were forgettable. But this one was not just forgettable...it's lousy. He could be very impressive as a director, but this film is a failure, at least from my perspective (and I understand he said it was his worst film).So here you have Huston, Lancaster, and Hepburn...and a theme of exposing racism at a time when that was not a common film theme (so rather gutsy), and my take on it is -- pass it by or watch it while holding your nose.
James Hitchcock
"The Unforgiven" is based upon a novel by Alan Le May, who also wrote "The Searchers", and in one respect the two films can be seen as mirror- images of one another. "The Searchers" deals with a young white girl who is kidnapped by Comanche Indians and brought up as a member of their tribe. "The Unforgiven" deals with a Native American girl adopted by a white family. Both women have much stronger loyalties and emotional ties to their adoptive kin than they do to their blood relations. Rachel Zachary is a young woman living with her family in Texas. (The film was actually shot in Mexico). Her life is turned upside-down when a half-crazed old man, Abe Kelsey, arrives in the area, claiming that she is an Indian, much to Rachel's dismay; she knows that she is adopted but has always believed herself to be white. Abe is known to have quarrelled with Rachel's late father Will, and has a long-standing grudge against the family, so his allegations are dismissed by Rachel's three adoptive brothers, Ben, Cash and Andy, and their mother Matilda. These allegations, however, are believed by the local Kiowa Indians whose chief, Lost Bird, believes Rachel to be his long-lost sister and, increasingly, by other white people in the area whose bitter racism against Native Americans also extends to anyone they suspect of having Indian blood. Eventually, Matilda is forced to admit that Abe's story is the truth and that Rachel is indeed a Kiowa, saved and adopted by her late husband as a baby after her parents were killed in a massacre. Audrey Hepburn was an unusual choice to play Rachel; she was not an actress associated with Westerns (this was her only one) and she is not convincing as a Native American. The film-makers, however, clearly wanted an established star in the role, which would have ruled out casting any actress of American Indian blood, and as the plot involves a romantic attraction between Rachel and Ben casting a white actress might have eased any possible problems with the Production Code. (The Code still officially banned mixed-race on-screen romances, although this tended to be overlooked if the non-white character was played by a white actress). Audrey herself may have been attracted to the movie by her own experiences of racism (she lived through the Nazi occupation of Holland) and by a desire to expand her range as an actress. Although she is best remembered today for light-hearted romantic comedies she was always anxious not to be typecast and, throughout her career, tended to alternate between this sort of film and more serious fare, appearing in the likes of "War and Peace", "The Nun's Story" and "The Children's Hour". In the event, she did not enjoy making "The Unforgiven", especially after she was injured falling from a horse, which perhaps explains why she never made another Western. She recovered from her injuries, however, and returned to the screen the following year with "Breakfast at Tiffany's", perhaps her greatest performance.Burt Lancaster was another actor who struggled successfully against typecasting, in his case as the hero of films noirs or of swashbuckling action-adventure movies, and by 1960 was starting to appear in the sort of serious, thoughtful roles which were to become his trademark in the latter part of his career. He gives the best performance in this film as Ben Zachary, the eldest of the three brothers, and a man torn between his instinctive honesty and his desire not to believe the unwelcome truth about his adoptive sister which, if generally known, would make the family pariahs in the eyes of their racist neighbours. The director John Huston is said to have described this as his least satisfying film, something which has always surprised me as he made a number of films far worse than this one, such as the tedious "The Bible" or the lame Bond spoof "Casino Royale". (Not everything Huston made was a "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" or a "Red Badge of Courage"). Much of his dissatisfaction seems to have stemmed from a dispute between him and the production company. Huston wanted to make a serious statement about racism in the Old West (and, by extension, in modern America), whereas the studio wanted a more conventional action Western, which they felt would be both more commercial and less controversial. The resulting compromise seems to have pleased neither party. That does not mean, however, that it should not please the viewer. "The Unforgiven" is in many ways an exciting film, although not in the conventional action-adventure sense. Some of the action sequences, such as the Indian attack on the Zachary homestead, seem a bit too protracted. (And were the Indians such poor military tacticians as to waste so many lives attacking unimportant objectives? Lost Bird seems to have sacrificed around thirty of his best warriors in this assault). The excitement, rather, derives from the interaction of the various characters, the interaction between Abe, who is about to be hanged for horse-stealing, and Matilda, as she desperately tries to get him to admit that what he has said about her daughter is a lie, is almost unbearably tense. And despite Huston's reservations the film does have something significant to say about race relations; the position of people like Rachel, Indian by blood but white by culture, is something rarely explored in Westerns. This is an unusual Western, but a good one. 7/10
writers_reign
The word on the set is that John Huston, disillusioned at the way The Red Badge Of Courage was mauled by the studio more or less threw in the towel and was content thereafter to phone it in. Stories of him reading a newspaper on set and allowing his assistants to run the show abound and it is undeniable that he never made a half-decent film post-Courage. He had a penchant for assembling several heavy hitters, putting them in an under-written off-the-wall screenplay and snatching a suet pudding from the jaws of a soufflé. He did it with Beat The Devil and damned if he doesn't do it here as well. There's something of Duel In The Sun about The Unforgiven in that both turn a team of top talent loose on turgid screenplays. We wait a long time for the revelation that Audrey Hepburn is not, as she and the audience supposed, white, but a half- breed 'stolen' from the Kiawa tribe some twenty years previously. Rather sportingly the Kiawas wait the same twenty years before claiming her as one of their own. So much for realism. It's hard to work up much of a sweat for this ponderous entry which had the chance to confront racial prejudice in a serious fashion and spurned it.
