story of the last western by Clint Eastwood- time.news

by time news
from Filippo Mazzarella

After this masterpiece, the great actor and director would no longer have ventured into the genre that I had made him famous for starting from Sergio Leone’s monstrous films.

Western is the prince / ghost / returning genre par excellence of American cinema, even today when its commercial glories and its “pure” form are increasingly distant. Because in the end it is a feeling, a mindset, a genetic makeup of Hollywood cinema itself, a Chinese box that has incorporated and attracted to itself all the other genres (comedy, musical, historical drama and even science fiction and horror, as Jordan Peele’s upcoming ‘Nope’ also demonstrates). It is an idea of ​​cinema-world in which the entire overseas imaginary is permeated, which time has hardly scratched and with which almost any filmmaker of the twentieth century has confronted, clashed, measured, no matter if he came out triumphant or defeated. .

First actor and then director

The western is also the territory in which Clint Eastwood titanically imposed himself, first only as an actor (and curiously in Italy, in the form of the mythical “remitization” operated by the “spaghetti western” of the seer Sergio Leone) and then as a tout court Author. But these are things that walls also know. Leon’s “dollar trilogy” (“For a Fistful of Dollars”, 1964; “For a Few Dollars More”, 1965; “The Good, the Bad, the Ugly”, 1966) launches it; “Hang him higher” (Hang ‘Em High, 1968, by Ted Post), “The vultures are hungry” (Two Mules for Sister Sara, 1970) and “Soldier Jonathan’s Good Night” (The Beguiled, 1971), wonderful double by Don Siegel, they consecrate him (in part). But it is when Clint decides to go behind the camera that progressively “his” western, his “applied” sensibility, his obscure and to some extent decadent and transcendent poetry, his paradoxically antiphrastic need to “embody” characters incontrovertibly and metaphorically ghostly make the difference. “The nameless stranger” (High Plains Drifter, 1973), “The Ice-Eyed Texan” (The Outlaw Josey Wales, 1976), “Bronco Billy” (id., 1980) and the magnificent and underrated “The pale knight »(Pale Rider, 1985) are at the same time elegies and epicedes, remembrances and restarts, melancholy reflections on the loss of innocence (of cinema and America), on the nature of violence, on the need for redemption.

A 7 year long break

In 1985, “The pale knight” seems to sanction for Eastwood the closure of an internal discourse with the genre and with himself: in a film that is only apparently realistic and in reality metaphysical and mystical, often furrowed by darkness and in which his character was “a solitary and taciturn knight who came from nowhere, perhaps a self-styled preacher, perhaps an angel of vengeance” (P. Mereghetti), the actor / director is definitively disincarnated, looks to the past (“The knight of the solitary valley”, but probably / unconsciously also to the mythical “Django”; or to the obsessions of “The Tree of Revenge” by Budd Boetticher) to disappear – literally – in the present of a dark age (those eighties that despite his reputation as a reactionary repugnant, as all his contemporary detective stories show, such as his “Courage … let yourself be killed / Sudden Impact”, 1982 or “Corda Tesa / Tightrope”, 1984, only formally credited to Richard Tuggle) where the silences of his gunslinger are more eloquent than any ideological proclamation. In fact, seven years will pass (a very long time for its production standards) before Eastwood decides to return for the last time (and definitive) to the genre with “Gli rietati / Unforgiven”, released in American cinemas on 7 August 1992 (and by us only in February of the following year): a film that, while living an absolute life of its own, cannot fail to be considered a personal and tragic post scriptum to the personal and “political” approach to Eastwood’s entire genre.

The Unforgiven: Eastwood’s latest western

Not surprisingly, the screenplay by David Webb Peoples (who had already contributed to dye the Dickian science fiction of “Blade Runner” black) operates a sensational and conscious gap within the genre, maintaining only a narrative skeleton of the “classic” western. basis to which Eastwood clings to definitively reaffirm the need to move away from it. The first shot is a gloriously naturalistic take of Wyoming’s natural majesty; but then everything quickly drowns in despair. Two wild cowboys scar a prostitute in a brothel who has allowed herself to mock her manhood and Sheriff “Little Bill” Daggett (Gene Hackman) merely asks them to reimburse the owner for damage to the property; but the women, eager to take revenge for not having seen them hanged, scrape together all their possessions to put a price on their heads. The first to come forward is a lethal bounty hunter (Richard Harris), whom Little Bill hunts from the city. But it is when the young and presumptuous Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) visits the outlaw turned pig farmer William Munny (Eastwood), in financial difficulty due to an epidemic that is decimating his beasts, that things change: the man accepts reluctantly, lured by the money he would also need to support his children, and involves another “reformed” killer, Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) in what will become a bloody all-out fight not so much against the violent cowboys as against the corrupt sheriff, unwilling to tolerate others exercising “justice” in his stead.

The ghost-actors: the specimens of nothing

It matters little that the film builds its climax around a carnage in which many will leave their skin; immediately, the acting characters of “The ruthless” (but the literal translation of the original title, “unforgiven” – or unforgiven: the absence of an article allows an amphibological reading – is much more pertinent), “good” or “bad” whether they are, they are all already “dead”, defeated, defeated, motivated to act by causes that have nothing to do with morality, the romanticism of heroes or the equally mythical greatness of nemeses; they are ghost-actors exemplary of nothing, archetypes emptied of a world here irrevocably drowned in night and darkness, appeared on the merciless stage of a Time and a History swept away by the dissolution of Ethics and Reason. The sense of the events, although contained in a structure with a “traditionally” trajectory hinged on a generic sense of “justice”, returns the unavoidable idea that there is no escape from an immanent violence that, once activated, solicited and “savored” ends up proving to be deceptively decisive. But the nihilist, anarchic and at the bottom mocking dimension of Eastwood’s reflection is all in the extraordinary line pronounced by Hackman before he died (“I don’t deserve this … to die like this. I was building a house.” / I don’t deserve this… to die like this. I was building a house) and in the immediately following exchange between Munny and Little Bill (which we leave you the pleasure of rediscovering and which concerns their future and coincident common destiny).

Success between Oscars and other films

Four Oscars (best film, direction, supporting actor – Hackman, in fact – and editing) honored one of the greatest masterpieces of the nineties. Eastwood, in 2005, will win another, again for the best direction (“Million Dollar Baby”); but it will never happen again (just scroll through the next filmography to realize it) in that territory if not by interposed genre, according to that idea of ​​”return” of the opening words of these same lines: the sci-fi sui generis of “Space Cowboys”, 2000 ; the meditation on death organized as in a “frontier film” of “Gran Torino”, 2008; the senile and comic nostalgia of the last -and endings? – «Il corriere – The Mule», 2018, and «Cry Macho – Homecoming», 2021). Because «Gli rietati» is not only Eastwood’s last western, but also the last western tout court in the entire history of cinema. Although, of course, it is not true at all.

August 7, 2022 (change August 7, 2022 | 07:57)

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