Unforgiven

After enduring a child’s cruel death, the composer/hero of Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus is moved to write a piece which will subvert the ebullient optimism of the “Ode to Joy” and “take back” Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony Mann’s oddly potent phrase springs to mind after viewing Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, the sixteenth film of an uneven but never uninteresting directorial career.”

A number of “against-the-grain” Westerns have questioned the near-sacred conventions of this most American of mythical movielands…

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