best movie i've ever seen.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

*** This review may contain spoilers *** *Plot and ending analyzed*When I first saw The Unforgiven in 1960 at the premiere film opening, with John Huston in attendance, I was wholly disgusted with the film. I could not believe the audience was applauding it. Somewhere inside, I was inherently sickened by the ending. The ending lacked any basis for humanity or compassion, or even understanding. If you are not familiar with it, it seems totally uncharacteristic and vile. It's like a gush of utter viciousness just came out of nowhere. Audrey Hepburn, who we find out is actually an adopted Kiowa, shoots her own Kiowa brother, who only wanted to find her. Then it ends on a peaceful note with the Anglo family hugging each other. I spoke to John Huston about it, but he was so busy with big-wigs to have a prolonged conversation. I later met with committees of Comanche, Kiowa, and Sioux Native Americans and organized a lecture by guest speakers. We spoke about the degradation of the Native Americans in film. It was the least one could do after facing such a harsh portrait on the screen.Further scenes are also rather repulsive, for example, Burt Lancaster had a Kiowa, who came on peace terms, shot dead outright. There are plenty of illustrations in the film. Audie Murphy is his usual reprehensible anti-Indian self and he's just unpleasant . I never liked him as an actor at all. The whole film has a mean streak to it.The attack on the homestead takes a large part of the ending. Kiowas would have had an easy time to get rid of the people in the homestead, the family would have not killed off their warriors in such a ridiculous scene. It was bad enough that the Kiowa attack on the homestead was preposterous, piling up enough dead Kiowas in a long, haphazard scene, but the driving point is that Audrey Hepburn doesn't care about her past at all. She hates being an "Indian". I suppose I side with Kiowas more since I lived with Kiowas, Comanches and Apaches and have studied their language and culture. They have a rich, vibrant history and a tradition of great culture. It seems like the whites don't think that way, thus they were demeaned as vile enemies in films and regarded as utter savages.Even without the demeaning ending, the film is merely average. It is the message that is inhuman that still affects me to this day.

The most unusual and conspicuous audio track to ever come out of Hollywood. A synthesis of Folkways nature recordings and 1950s Soviet animation soundtrack music is a poetic way of putting it. Seriously though. I don't think the vibe of the disembodied music was repeated for another twenty years until Mad Max. Visually, the vibe is similar to other low-budget westerns of the era with the fake, dimmed night scenes, but the audio is absolutely unique and surreal from beginning to end. On the surface the audio can be distracting and, no doubt, signify a B-Movie aesthetic. Hey, you youngsters with time and ambition to pursue a PHD in film, thesisify this movies soundtrack. There seem to be no thoughtful examinations of it in the literature.

The unforgiven is a nice movie, western. That is a good story which find in this movie a good adaptation for the cinema. This story is about a Indian woman who live since she was baby with a white farmer and cattle and horse breeder family. and naturally with the impulse and the coming of an old man who know the true, the Indian Kiowa want to rehabilitate the girl.The story is the opposite (inverse), contrary of the searchers (1956) with John Wayne and Nathalie Wood.In the unforgiven the girl make a different choice for the issue of the story. The story is good because the mystery and a little suspense appear, and it is on the top with the Indians.One of assets in the unforgiven is the photography. We have beautiful pictures in this film.And we find a great Audrey Hepburn, who give something magic and mysterious anytime she is on the screen.A nice western to see.jelios jelios@hotmail.fr

Very disappointing 1960 film dealing with racial prejudice.Audrey Hepburn at some turns seemed emotionally detached from her role, as an adopted girl who discovers on the frontier that she was an Indian baby taken by the Zachary family at the time of an Indian massacre.Hepburn shows restraint in some scenes as the nun she showed a year before in "The Nun's Story." Burt Lancaster, as her adopted brother, shows some similarities to his Oscar winning performance that same year in "Elmer Gantry." He is again a stalwart,showing religious convictions and no prejudice whatsoever.Audie Murphy is the real rebel here, as another brother who can't accept the fact that his adopted sister is really an Indian and abandons the family to pursue romance with Kipp Hamilton, late sister-in-law of television's Carol Burnett. For me, Hamilton made her mark as the distraught former student of Jennifer Jones in "Good Morning, Miss Dove," 5 years before this film.Veteran pro Lillian Gish is gutsy in the thankless role of the mother. She will do anything to hide the truth.The movie just tells about a group's prejudice reaction. It doesn't go into the necessary detail.Hepburn's rejection of her real life comes into focus at the end, but by this time the film has degenerated into "A Gunfight at the OK Corral-like atmosphere.