Financial Times (London,England)

September 17, 1992, Thursday

The Wild West exposed

By STEPHEN AMIDON

UNFORGIVEN (15)Empire, Camden Plaza, MGMs West End
A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN (PG) Odeon West End, MGMs Chelsea & Oxford St
THE HOURS AND TIMES ICA

Clint Eastwood’s brilliant and harrowing Unforgiven packs all the punch of a good Western without indulging in the plot cliches and moral certitudes so often inherent in the genre. Eastwood, who at 62 seems to have reached his peak form as a director, seems finally to have gained the artistic confidence to toss such old chestnuts as the heroic gunslinger, righteous sheriff and good-hearted whore into the fire, where they proceed to explode in the audience’s face.
The film tells the story of ageing gunfighter, Bill Munny (Eastwood), who has become an apparently reformed farmer and family man. But things begin to go bad for him – his wife dies, followed by most of his herd of pigs. When the opportunity comes to make some fast money by killing two cowboys who allegedly mutilated a woman, Munny takes the job to insure his children’s future. He enlists the help of his old sidekick, Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) and sets out for the cowboys’ hideout near Big Whiskey, a frontier town presided over by a tough sheriff (Gene Hackman).

A familiar enough story to this point, though Eastwood and writer David Webb Peoples proceed to set the whole thing on its head, foregoing standard Western plot lines to expose the barbarism, cowardice and cruelty that must have lain at the heart of the real Old West. Munny’s glory days as a gunfighter are gradually shown to be a prolonged spell of drunken, homicidal insanity in which good guys, bad guys, women and children were his victims. Indeed, when the time comes for him to engage in his first gunfight, it turns out to a repellent act of bushwhacking.
The woman Munny and his friends are supposed to be avenging turns out to a whore whose injuries are far less serious than first thought. Even the good guys are shown to be corrupt – Hackman’s sheriff turns out to be a sadist with no regard for the law. The mixture of these various rotten elements leads toward a finale in which characters meet their dismal fate with equal degrees of ignominy and damnation. The only one who makes a choice that could be called heroic ends up a cadaver left on display in Big Whiskey’s main street.
It is a grim picture lightened by fine acting, beautiful photography and, most of all, subversively mordant irony. Nothing is at it seems in Big Whiskey. It’s worse. Richard Harris has a wonderful supporting role as English Bob, another hired gun who comes across as a gentleman gunfighter yet is soon exposed a cowardly assassin in the pay of railroad bosses. Munny is forced to confess that his drink-addled brain cannot recollect the deeds that made him famous, though it is this very past which comes back to seal his doom.
Indeed, as a reformed character he is useless, falling off his horse, shooting poorly and losing fights. It is only when he goes back on the bottle that he becomes an effective gunman again. Most tellingly of all, there is the device of having a pulp writer (Saul Rubinek) to ‘record’ the whole bloody pageant, thereby allowing the audience to see how myopic, headline-grabbing eyes can transform barbarism into myth.
Despite Eastwood’s finely ironic touch, this must still be one of the bleakest films to ever top the American box office. Life in 1880′s Wyoming is shown as being nasty, brutish and, for the lucky ones anyway, short. What looks at first to be a trot to redemption ends up a gallop into hell. True, there are some half-hearted attempts at Christian imagery – an ill Munny sleeps for three days before rising to meet his destiny, while Logan is strung up as if on a cross and whipped when captured. But these are merely teases – the film’s ethos is ultimately Old Testament, with Eastwood’s last words a unredeemed jeremiad that thunders through the streets of Big Whiskey.
Yet, despite its bleakness, the film remains richly rewarding, peppered with the sort of memorable one-liners for which Eastwood is famous and ending with a shoot out that will not disappoint traditionalists. Just don’t expect the good guys to ride off into the sunset.
A League of Their Own combines wartime nostalgia, lots of baseball and an innocuous dose of feminism. It tells the story of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, formed in 1943 when many male baseball players had gone off to war. Geena Davis portrays an Oregonian farm girl who is lured, along with her sister (Lori Petty), to play for the Rockford Peaches. After much initial scepticism on the part of fans and their hard-drinking coach (Tom Hanks), the women’s grit and determination win the day.
The film works best as a comedy, with especially funny turns by Jon Lovitz as a wise-cracking scout and Hanks as the drunken has-been player. There is also some gratifyingly skillful baseball. Davis performs well in the thankless role of the humourless head girl who just wants to go home and have babies, while Madonna, as the team’s obligatory loose woman, wisely confines her efforts to providing strong supporting help. Director Penny Marshall once again proves herself to possess both a deft hand for light comedy and an unfortunate weakness for sentimentality.
The Hours and Times is a wistful, well-acted drama about an imaginary weekend that John Lennon and Beatles manager Brian Epstein might have spent together in 1963. Set in Barcelona, the film concerns Epstein’s attempts to confess his love and longing for Lennon, which the latter gently yet firmly rejects. He is greatly aided by Ian Hart’s deft impersonation of the cocky yet sensitive Lennon and David Angus’s considered portrayal of the tortured Epstein.