This week’s Poster Baby pays homage to the seminal western with an Unforgiven poster.
Ask anyone to name their top 5 Western movies and Unforgiven is sure to be among them. Regarded by many to be one of the finest Westerns ever made, Unforgiven is Clint Eastwood’s love letter to the genre that launched his career and also serves as a poetic farewell to the romanticism and violence that have characterized the American Western for over a century.
Every actor brings his A-game, from Gene Hackman as the villainous Little Bill to Morgan Freeman as Ned Logan, a retired gunfighter who accompanies William Munny on one last hit. The showdown between Munny and a bar room full of gunmen is still an intense and beautiful display of bad-assery, but Unforgiven stands out because it’s a meditation on what happens when the last bullet has been fired, and how cold-blooded killers live with their actions and confront their legacy as their twilight years start winding down.
A lot of Westerns have come and gone since Unforgiven was released, but it remains the Western to end all Westerns.
Check out my vision of the Unforgiven poster.
