The Oscar Project #65: Unforgiven (1992)

by Chris Marshall:

Unforgiven is a work of genius, one of those rare films where I felt like I was experiencing greatness while I was watching it. I expected it to be good, but I was completely taken off guard by how much I loved it. It was nearly perfect.

Clint Eastwood is one of the immortal legends of American cinema, and his very presence in a film means something. That’s not to say that every one of his movies is good; that’s far from the truth. But particularly in the latter part of his career, his face carries such a heavy symbolic weight that he hardly needs to say anything at all. Of course, Eastwood is typically at his best when he’s silent.

Eastwood, as the “reformed” outlaw William Munny, has plenty of lines in Unforgiven, but he delivers them in a way that lets us know that he never says anything without contemplating it deeply. He has acquired a deep wisdom, both from his worst days and from his best days. But he knows he will never truly be a good man, for he has committed unspeakable atrocities, sins that he can never atone for.

The Oscar Project #44: The French Connection (1971)

by Chris Marshall:

I have an interesting relationship with The French Connection in that I’ve never seen it before, but I’ve written about it. More specifically, I’ve written about Pauline Kael’s review of it in The New Yorker. Kael strongly disliked the movie, claiming that it was “what we once feared mass entertainment might become: jolts for jocks.”

My opinion wasn’t as harsh, but she was right about at least one thing: it was one of a few films that came out around this time that had a common theme. This, Dirty Harry, and Walking Tall were all made in the early 1970s, and all concerned law enforcement officials that had to go against the wishes of higher-ups to catch the villains.

You can make up your own mind about why there were so many films of this variety coming out at the time, but some common explanations were that they were reactions against the Nixon administration, or the war in Vietnam, or in some cases, a reaction against the reactions against the two aforementioned topics. Kael also described Dirty Harry as “fascist,” and Walking Tall doesn’t exactly contain the most liberal themes in the world.