With the 34th overall pick, team
Hot Buttery Topping is proud to add its second Oscar-winning Best Picture...in the
Western category, 1992's Unforgiven.
It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. Take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have.
In the early 90s, a western starring 4 actors born in the 1930s was not the type of movie that one would expect to clean up at the Oscars, but that's exactly what it did.
Clint Eastwood returned to the Western genre that made him famous. This time, his character, William Munny, is a retired gunslinger turned farmer who can't pass up the reward being offered by a group of prostitutes who want revenge for one of their own, a young girl who had her face cut up by an angry customer.
Gene Hackman won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as the former gunfighter and current town sheriff, Little Bill Daggett. Richard Harris gives a memorable performance as English Bob, and Morgan Freeman (the youngest of the four stars) plays Munny's former partner Ned Logan.
Unforgiven is brutally violent, but it doesn't glorify the violence. When the Schofield Kid makes his first kill, he is visibly shaken and he realizes that the gunslinger's life is not the glamourous existence he read about in the pulp magazines.
At a time when the Western felt like a dead genre, many considered this to be Eastwood's eulogy.
Any man don't wanna get killed better clear on out the back.
Any discussion of Unforgiven would be incomplete without mention of the impact its success had on the Calgary movie scene. As long as little boys dream of being cowboys, and those little boys grow up to be filmmakers, the western will have a place in the world of cinema. Thanks to Unforgiven's breathtaking vistas, more often than not, when one of those filmmakers decides to make a western, they'll choose the (virtually) unspoiled countryside of Southern Alberta as their backdrop.
All right, I'm coming out. Any man I see out there, I'm gonna shoot him. Any sumbitch takes a shot at me, I'm not only gonna kill him, but I'm gonna kill his wife, all his friends, and burn his damn house down.