USA,
1992, 131 min
Shown in 2012
CREDITS
- dir
-
Clint Eastwood
- prod
-
Clint Eastwood
- scr
-
David Webb Peoples
- cam
-
Jack N. Green
- editor
-
Joel Cox
- mus
-
Lennie Niehaus
- cast
-
Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman
With two small children to raise and his hog farm failing, reformed outlaw Will Munny (Clint Eastwood) needs money, so he reluctantly agrees to partner with a bounty hunting youth, The Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett), on a quest to collect a big reward for tracking down the cowboys who mutilated a prostitute. Munny's old friend Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) joins the team and the trio travels to Big Whiskey, where Munny's hesitation to return to his violent ways gives way to resolution to extract vengeance after sadistic Sheriff Little Bill Daggett's (Gene Hackman) savage actions make the mission personal. Director Eastwood gives a nod to the Man with No Name and other ghosts of his Western past and shatters the myths of the genre with this tense and elegant drama that is further enriched by Jack N. Green's gorgeous cinematography and a crackerjack cast that includes Richard Harris as a gun-slinging dandy, Saul Rubinek as a dime novelist, and Frances Fisher as a brothel madam. Screenwriter David Webb Peoples fills the screen with finely wrought, memorable characters; leavens the brutality with humor; and spins a tale that as it builds to its inexorable climax, strips this elderly gunfighter of romantic and heroic trappings, revealing the all too human being beneath the legend.
—Pam Grady
FACTOID #217
A sporadic SFIFF tradition, fashion shows are lighthearted affairs that help raise funds for the Festival. In 1968, Oakland designer Richard Tam mounted a show at the Fairmont Hotel that attracted high society; the Examiner commented that the show ’combined Tam’s simple daytime elegance with his almost theatrical evening gowns.’
