The Frame

After my disappointment with the generally-acclaimed The Proposition last month, I was a little wary of Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning revisionist Western, but that wariness turned out to be unfounded. Eastwood plays a former gunslinger asked to come out of retirement in order to track down a man who beat up one of the local, um, women of ill repute. There’s ethical issues of whether it’s okay to beat up a prostitute, whether she’s worth avenging, not to mention Eastwood’s personal reservations about re-entering a world of violence after he successfully left it and forged a new life for himself and his young children. His fear of his own ability to carry out only one job and not be pulled back into a love of violence is really the emotional center of the film, and Eastwood holds the other disparate elements together very well both as an actor and as a director. As a director, he has a wonderfully old-fashioned touch that makes you almost feel that you’re watching a great Golden Age film (he pulls this off with Million Dollar Baby as well), yet with a level of ethical probing that was only found in the very, very best of Golden Age westerns.
Well Above Average