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UNFORGIVEN – Lennie Niehaus and Clint Eastwood
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
For almost the entire 1980s, and for the first couple of years of the 1990s, the western genre was considered passé, a relic of a different era in Hollywood. Long gone were the days when cowboy movies ruled the box office, so much so that, with the rare exception of one-offs like Silverado and Dances With Wolves, there hadn’t been a major western box office success since The Outlaw Josey Wales in 1976. It’s perhaps fitting that Clint Eastwood, the star of Josey Wales and one of the greatest western stars in history, would be the one to re-invigorate the genre 15 years later, with his Oscar-winning classic Unforgiven. The film was adapted from a screenplay by David Webb Peoples and is a revisionist take on a classic tale wherein an ageing gunslinger is forced to come out of retirement and take on one last job to collect a bounty. Eastwood plays the retired killer, Will Munny, who travels from Kansas to Wyoming with his old friend Ned (Morgan Freeman) and a brash upstart called The Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett), and eventually crosses paths with another bounty hunter, English Bob (Richard Harris), and the ruthless local sheriff, Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman). Read more…
Lennie Niehaus, 1929-2020
Composer Lennie Niehaus died on May 28, 2020, at his home in Redlands, California, of a heart-related illness. He was 90.
Leonard Niehaus was born in June 1929, in St. Louis, Missouri, but grew up in Los Angeles, where he developed his love for music. He graduated from California State University, Los Angeles, with a degree in music composition. Niehaus began his career as a jazz alto saxophonist, gaining prominence in the 1950s as a member of Stan Kenton’s orchestra. He was celebrated for his fluid improvisation and skillful arrangements, which earned him a respected place in the West Coast jazz scene.
In the 1960s Niehaus began orchestrating for television and film composer Jerry Fielding; Niehaus worked with Fielding on approximately seventy TV shows and films, including Straw Dogs (1971), Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), the comedy The Bad News Bears (1976), and the horror film Demon Seed (1977). Read more…
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