The Unforgiven (1960)
Director: John Huston
Stars: Burt Lancaster, Audrey Hepburn, Audie Murphy, Lillian
Gish
Short Review, no spoilers
An unusual, folk-western shot through the lens of a big
character director but reluctant auteur, The Unforgiven was abandoned even by
John Huston himself as the one he liked least of all the films he made. In
awkward opposition I find it to be one of my favourites. Of the many aspects I
find fascinating about the film, I advise to look past any cynicism with
regards to the casting of Audrey Hepburn, because it is one of the many
curiosities that make the film so disarmingly unique. A mixture of quirky
artistry, high melodrama and surreal fable, its ending is flawed but overall, I
find it to be another unsung gem of the western genre.
Full Review (spoilers)
Despite director John Huston’s condemnation of The
Unforgiven and also general disregard for any claims that he could be described
as an auteur, it’s arguable that his singularly eccentric style and fondness
for ambitiously hopeful but romantically flawed characters shines through as
distinctly in The Unforgiven as in any of his other films. It is perhaps also this
combined with the commercially driven forces of star Burt Lancaster’s production
company that Huston was so against that actually produces a quite fascinatingly
contentious fable of a community torn apart by racial tension. As a result, a
mixed environment grasping for authenticity, loyalty and heritage is
whimsically realised in a compelling drama with moralities explored in all
their rightful complexity.
Whereas many characters in classical westerns are elevated
as romantically historical and cultural figures, what is pleasing about the
protagonists of The Unforgiven is their rustic and authentically accented hick charm.
These are the real pioneers – stoic families attempting to sow roots in the
middle of nowhere under constant threat of Indian attack, with belief more than
right spurring them on. They talk plain, are unabashed in their manner and they
dance and clown with the unselfconsciousness of an isolated community unjudged
by outsider eyes. They are not actually from this land at all, something
acknowledged in Momma’s appreciation and ability to play Mozart on the ‘piani’.
Played by veteran doe-eyed darling of the silent era, Lillian Gish, she’s also a
tough old buzzard, wielding a shotgun with the naturalism of an experienced
survivalist. As seemingly straightforward as these folk may seem to be however,
secrets and lies have been accumulated in the building of their small patches
of white American colonisation. This is alluded to from the outset with the
arrival of a dust-covered ghost in the form of a mad, wandering war veteran on
horseback, Kelsey. Waiting for the menfolk to return from a trip, young Rachel
and Momma are alone at the homestead, and at first Momma speaks with sad
sympathy of him as one of many traumatised post-war vagrants drifting through
the desert before recognition is sparked and with it the threat to their
familial harmony. Discord is temporarily suspended when beloved son and brother
Ben returns with siblings Cash and Andy in tow, but Kelsey haunts their
celebration and it is clear that trouble is on the horizon. In a stunningly
eerie and surreal sequence, Ben and Cash go after a howling, warbling Kelsey through
the swirl of a dust storm in a cactus field, only to lose him when he comes
like a banshee with sabre aloft and Cash stumbles away in his wake.
As the family get back to business, we gain further
understanding of the characters and their relationships with each other,
something that is established by excellent performances, particularly by
Lancaster, Hepburn and Murphy. Lancaster’s typical gravitas is here channelled
in to a portrait of a charismatically bombastic if naïve man, fiercely loyal to
his family and to the land they call their own, a man whose sheer self-belief
and courage against all reason is endearing even as his bluster is so dangerously
uncompromising. Despite this, he is a natural leader of men and still has the
capacity to demonstrate diplomacy, not least when handling boozy racist Cash - Audie
Murphy in an older, more rugged role that nevertheless here plays younger
brother to Lancaster. And then there’s dark-haired sister Rachel, doted on by
all but brought to the family a Native American foundling - the big secret only
Momma and Kelsey know and which will ultimately blow the family and community
apart when it is revealed.
The idea that Audrey Hepburn, an icon of sophisticated
European elegance as depicted by Hollywood, could pull off playing a Native
American girl and one that scrubs around in a 19th century Texas western
might seem unlikely, but it’s actually a fascinating piece of casting. It’s a
refreshing change to see her dancer-trained athleticism used not for a stylish
mannequin but instead to portray a scrappy, hillbilly wild child, her
physicality moulded in to a beautiful, wiry and impish youth with an uncultured
and naïve but wittily provocative girlishness who is direct in her demands for
courtship and marriage, but also playful and free in her impulses to jump on
her beloved horse and ride bareback across the prairie. She adores Ben and the
playful mocking banter of ‘brother and sister’ lies lightly over an underlying
and building romantic tension.
The character of Johnny Portugal – a surprisingly cool John
Saxon - lays bare the racial tensions in the community. As a Native American
working for Ben, he laconically out-machos a bristling Cash by throwing a knife
in to the side of a wagon and then sauntering over to hang his hat on it, then
shows the bumbling whites how to break a horse with gentle respect and
patience. However, his innocent removal of a burr from Rachel’s hair is a step
in the wrong direction for Ben - who had previously defended him – and he
jealously chastises both him and then Rachel for hanging around the menfolk.
Later though, Portugal is the best man to chase down Kelsey and the horse he
stole from Rachel in an exhilarating scene when Portugal takes 3 horses to
breathlessly pursue the mad, troublemaking thief.
Such is the rough and tumble of these characters and their
dealings with and in front of each other. Ben’s emphatic declarations of power
inspire awe and delight when he delivers the piano to his beloved Momma by
lifting it from the wagon using only his back, but the same spirit is shown to
be dubious when he calls the land and sky above him his and his alone to the
Native American warrior that comes to collect his natural born sister, Rachel.
Kelsey appears and chillingly speaks of avenging angel madness and howls hymns
of God and country in lost lunatic tones, however it is he who is the link with
the past and the truth that our heroes try desperately to avoid. The music,
composed by Dimitri Tiomkin, weirdly complements the wayward eccentricity of
the film, sometimes playfully and sometimes melodramatically evoking the spirit
of a bullish, prancing, warrior-peasant.
In the final battle scene, the beleaguered Zacharys bravely
and foolishly defend their little home, and family loyalties are thrown in to
the wind to resettle where they may. Truth and blood is spilled, and love wins
out over birth kin. The Zacharys meet the Indian war drums with Momma’s piano,
then having to leave it to the spears of the warriors but fighting with
admirable spirit that sees death but battles it anyway. Nevertheless, there is
no sense of glory or triumph in the killings of Native Americans who initially
come with peace and reason and are attacked on the orders of Ben. Rachel kills
her own true brother and at first it appears that this might be a turning point
as she walks in conflicted anguish past Ben and Andy. But in the end, she is ultimately
reunited with the only family that she has ever known and the one that risked
everything to stand by her.
There is an aching sense of doom in the finale that appears
to build towards what would have been a more understandable ending of the
heroes perishing: Andy’s regret at never losing his virginity in Wichita and
the bittersweet confirmation of Ben and Rachel’s love. The fact that they
survive is inexplicable, although the rousing return of Cash to help save them
papers over some of the unfeasibility. The last moment of the film is a
reference to Rachel commenting on migrating geese being like humans but only
flying a little higher, and seems like a conclusion thrown on after an exhausting
production that the director had had enough of by the time it came to it. This
is unfortunate because despite its troubles, the film really isn’t as bad as Huston
thought it was, and at the end of it all is actually probably even more complex
than he had hoped for and as enthralling as Lancaster wanted.
Overall, The Unforgiven is a strange, flawed treasure and a
misfit, but I would argue that this just makes it that much more surprisingly
compelling.