1960: The Unforgiven

The Unforgiven (Huston, 1960) 7/10

John Huston's 1960 Western The Unforgiven was a film fraught with tragedy and dissolution both on and off-screen. Featuring a strong, reputable cast including Burt Lancaster, Audie Murphy, Lillian Gish and Audrey Hepburn in her only entry in the genre, The Unforgiven had the ingredients to be a box-office success, the film's lead star and co-producer Lancaster desired. Nevertheless from its inception, The Unforgiven was a work painted in shades of lament.

In the mid-Fifties and early Sixties, the Western had morphed into an important artistic vehicle for socio-political debate, particularly in the realm of race. The question of historical and present-day racism was subsequently addressed in film's such as John Ford's The Searchers, Anthony Mann's Cimarron and Don Siegel's Elvis Presley vehicle The Flaming Star.

For Huston, this project was also earmarked as a challenging allegorical piece designed to reflect America's contemporary racial disharmony. Instead, the film was disowned by its creator and its principal performers; the sorrowful filled victim of what Huston would later term as a "celestial vengeance."

By the time filming had completed, three crew members had perished in a plane crash and two miscarriages had been suffered. Additionally, Hepburn had seriously injured her back after falling from a horse, Audie Murphy had almost drowned on a nearby lake and Huston had been the victim of a knife attack. The myriad of delays coupled with the hefty wages of the star-filled cast prompted the termination of Lancaster's production company HHL. Failing to find an audience, the film was a commercial failure. Removed almost forty years from its initial release, The Unforgiven stands out as an interesting, overlooked and misunderstood film affected by the constraints of its time and the confrontation between art and commerce.

Located amongst the swirling sandy brush and the limbs of desiccated trees, the baked-mud walls of the Zachary ranch have demonstrated a tenuous permanency. Eking out a modest subsistence for years, the family fortunes finally appear to be on the upswing. Ersatz family patriarch Ben (Burt Lancaster) has returned from Wichita equipped with not only dreams of expanding their shared cattle business, but also with a modicum of western civilization: a small piano gifted through the muscular first-born's ability to win a bet through his strength.

Nevertheless social disaster soon strikes, as once dormant ghosts from the past return in the form of a one-eyed horseman (Joseph Wiseman) named Abe Kelsey. Spouting religious verse, blanketed in dust and baked into madness by the searing heat, Kelsey's mumbled ramblings appear to be little more than the words of a madman. In spite of Kelsey's mental fragility and susceptibility, his provocative mumblings about the racial origins of Ben's adopted sister Rachel (Audrey Hepburn) stir raw, primal emotions amongst the Zachary men, including Ben and his racist brother Cash (Audie Murphy).

As the Zachary boys try in desperation to track down Abe Kelsey, the influence of his ramblings permeates through the community. In an inversion of Ford's The Searchers, a local Kiowa tribe beseech the Zachary's to return the now adult Rachel to her people. Their methodology is one of peace and honour; even if their approach slants toward bartering for Rachel through the trading of horses, as if she were a mere commodity.

Concurrent with the Kiowa's requests, the Zachary's closet friends and trading partners also call for Rachel's reversion to the Kiowa in order to protect their own product: the threat of communal and entrepreneurial exile the high price for any corresponding inaction. Ben refuses to capitulate to either demands, even if by the film's finale, his reasoning is more incestuous than noble.

Supremely shot by Franz Planer, The Unforgiven is an often messy, yet interesting Western. Using the past as a distancing device, Huston aimed for The Unforgiven to be an outlet to explore racial conflict in 1960's America. But through a combination of off-screen mishaps and on-screen slovenliness, The Unforgiven never really fulfilled its potential. Based on a story by The Searchers author Alan LeMay, The Unforgiven similarly tries to address many of the racial and social concerns put forth in Ford's adaptation of the former. Unlike Ford's film, Huston's work fails to fully embrace these concepts, primarily due to the off-screen friction between Huston and the film's producer(s) and star.

Whereas Ford's protagonist Ethan Edwards is shown as an insensitive demonizing figure unable to adapt to the textured complexities of modern America, Huston's Ben Zachary is an atypical strapping hero by the film's final moments. Despite an early reverence for the peaceful Kiowa, there is little in the melodramatic story that serves to fully acknowledge the indigenous characters as multi-faceted beings. Bizarrely for a film devoted to an anti-racist message, the prolonged destruction of the Kiowa outside the Zachary household subtly depicts the Native Americans merely as superstitious, child-like creatures. In contrast, Lancaster's Zachary is portrayed in a positive manner as a family man desperate to protect his own interests; in spite of his incestuous desires for his half sister and his orders to shoot to kill upon an amicable party of Kiowa diplomats.

While Huston intended for The Unforgiven as an essay on racism, the overall effect is insipidly muted. This primarily stems from the muddled angles toward a serious examination of the topic throughout the film. The exigency held by Rachel in the film's final sequences is a particularly noticeable product of this problem: leaving the character involved in a twisted decision between nature or nurture. Ultimately, her choice is predicated through violence, rather than love as she decides between her biological and adoptive families: a facet that leaves Huston's flawed treatise cold and barren upon reaching its coda.

For contemporary audiences, The Unforgiven may work better as an examination of the tracts sociological racism built with the "pioneer spirit:" attributes plainly imbued by the callous Cash Zachary and subtly demonstrated by much of the community's xenophobic populace. Despite its notable contextual plot flaws and the miscasting of Hepburn, The Unforgiven is a peculiar and often compelling melodramatic Western. Featuring a brutish, against-type performance by Audie Murphy, a resilient Lillian Gish and an imposing Burt Lancaster, The Unforgiven is a misguidedly fissured film: an often captivating family melodrama that subsequently fails to dismantle the mythology of the West it yearns to correct.

* The Unforgiven is available on DVD through MGM Home Video

Other John Huston Films Reviewed:
Across The Pacific (1942) 3/10
Night of the Iguana (1964) 9/10

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque