The Unforgiven (1960)

 

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 19^th 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.