Unforgiven: 10th Anniversary Edition

Seeing Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven again, ten years after its initial release in 1992, I'm still disappointed by a final reel that spirals madly out of narrative control, but I'm more appreciative today of the near-flawless trajectory of the first three-quarters of this Academy Award-winning contemporary Western, which is set into motion when a young whore innocently giggles at a ranch hand's sexual shortcomings and pays an exacting price with a cut-up face. Disappointed in local sheriff Little Bill Daggett's (Gene Hackman, in an Oscar-winning performance) light sentence of forfeited horses, the brothel women band together and raise up bounty money for a more lasting punishment, a reward that attracts a wide range of takers--from the late Richard Harris as the gun-for-hire English Bob to the motley trio of retired gunfighter William Munny (Eastwood), his friend Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), and the hothead "Schofield Kid" (Jaimz Woolvett). David Webb Peoples' excellent script is peppered with memorable lines, including Munny's famous rejoinder to Little Bill, "deserve's got nothing to do with it," an apt aphorism that encapsulates one of the film's central themes: killing is not always just, hardly ever clean, and is terribly final (Munny on killing a man: you "take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have"). Warner's double disc special edition features a gorgeous new digital widescreen transfer that showcases Jack N. Green's luscious cinematography, backed by an expansive Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack. The dynamite extras package includes an audio commentary track by Time film critic and Eastwood biographer Richard Schickel, who also wrote and directed two of the four documentaries on the second disc: the 24-minute "Eastwood & Co.: Making Unforgiven," as well as the excellent 69-minute John Cusack-narrated bio-doc "Eastwood on Eastwood." Rounding out the extras are the new Morgan Freeman-hosted 23-minute retrospective "All On Accounta Pullin' a Trigger," the 16-minute making-of "Eastwood…A Star," and the 1959 Maverick episode "Duel at Sundown," featuring Eastwood as a hot-headed young gunslinger. A powerful, challenging film, packaged with a bevy of wonderful extras, this is highly recommended. (R. Pitman)