In many respects "The Unforgiven" is a dreadfully stereotypical 1950's western. Forty Indians attack, hundreds are killed, and forty ride off (sadly, this would have represented most of the able-bodied warriors in the Kiowa tribe at the time this film is supposed to have occurred). Most seem to be played by Italians. Values are again stereotypical, but the film has aged in a rather unusual way: the lead characters, who were written and directed to be sympathetic and largely admirable people, are changed in the light of modern values into the role of antiheroes. Lillian Gish, here recast in her "Night of The Hunter" role of a shotgun-toting grandma, has hidden a dark secret, allowed innocents to die in her efforts to preserve it, and won't reveal it even to her daughter until impelled by her entire family. It is a lie that poisons her life and that of her family for years. She is cast as virtuous for keeping that secret, but clearly, she would have had a better hope of happiness if she had not kept the lie. Burt Lancaster here reprises Gregory Peck's role of a strong but obsessed cowhand in "Duel in the Sun" (a film that also starred Lillian Gish, with a role for Walter Huston), this time with his obsession focused on Audrey Hepburn but bottled up even tighter. His madness and his moral vacancy is revealed when he threatens to kill men for saying something that he knows may be both true and important, and still more when he kills an Indian under a flag of truce because he would rather die with Audrey than surrender her to her birth family. Audrey, finally, surrenders her nobility when she starts to kill her family, starting with attacking warriors and ending with her own brother, who has braved death several times just to meet her, and has never raised a hand against her. He, the only heroic character in the film, never speaks to her. I could go on to discuss the gaping character flaws in some other characters - played by Audie Murphy and Charles Bickford - or the sparks of nobility seen in the tortured villain Kelsey, played by the early television star Joseph Wiseman - but the pattern is clear; Huston, aided by the passage of time and the recasting of social values, has turned virtue and vice around in this film until the stars are all antiheroes.
Review of The Unforgiven
