Every day, AlloCiné recommends a film to (re)watch on TV. Tonight: a black western by and with Clint Eastwood.
At the beginning of the 1990s, Clint Eastwood looked for a new project to recover from the successive commercial failures of his last films, La Relève and Chasseur blanc, coeur noir.
His contract with Warner coming to an end, Clint Eastwood signed with Columbia to begin work on Merciless, the fourth western of his career as a director.
The script, which had passed from hand to hand for around twenty years, finally came back to him at the right time. Aged 62, the filmmaker perfectly matches the profile of the main character, William Munny, a formidable outlaw converted to breeding who will, at the request of a young killer, return to service to avenge a disfigured prostitute by a sadistic cowboy.
Here, there is therefore no question of an epic or poetic West. Clint Eastwood, on the contrary, decides to revisit the genre that revealed him by depicting all its poverty, sadism and violence.
The bad guys are real bad guys (Gene Hackman makes the blood run cold with his savagery) and the heroes are no better. In front of the camera, Clint Eastwood lends his features to an aging and disillusioned man; a counterpoint to the lawless gunslingers who made him famous at the start of his career.
With its 159 million dollars in revenue collected at the worldwide box office, Ruthlessproduced for $14 million, puts Clint Eastwood back in the spotlight.
The third western in history to win the Oscar for Best Film (after The Rush to the West by Wesley Ruggles and Dances with Wolves by Kevin Costner), Merciless also won the Oscar for Best Direction, Best Supporting Actor for Gene Hackman and Best Editing.
Dedicated to his mentors Sergio Leone and Don Siegel, Ruthless is Clint Eastwood’s best western according to AlloCiné spectators who give it an average rating of 4.2/5.
Ruthless by Clint Eastwood with Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman…
From 10 years old
Tonight on France 3 at 9:10 p.m.