The Unforgiven: How Hollywood Whitewashed Racism
John Huston succumbs to Prairie Fever when this 1960 Burt Lancaster feature goes off the rails.
John Sayles, John Huston’s assistant director on the film, The Unforgiven, remembers that John Huston would “talk about race relations in the South and address questions of bigotry. Those were things he thought people should talk about.”
It’s 1960, so it’s easy to understand why Huston was looking for an opportunity to examine racial relations in the United States. No one was interested. They wanted John to deliver a John Wayne like western where Burt Lancaster played an earlier version of his Man who Shot Liberty Valance character — a gunfighter with a complicated past come to save Hepburn from some angry Indians riding through the desert trying to kill them all. They tacked the ending on and John Huston was not pleased, even though it did well at the box office. And because this movie didn’t turn out as he wanted, he soon called it the worst of his career.
Houston’s film also stars Audrey Hepburn, as always eating up the scenery with her incandescent beauty. Production had to suspend when Hepburn fell from a horse in an accident, broke her back and miscarried her baby.
