Let's be realistic.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

.Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

This is a complicated Western about racism, secrets and a family in denial.. I found it as good as good gets. Burt Lancaster as the big brother and the head of the family is always good. Lilian Gish gives a heart wrenching performance as the mother torn between her need to have a girl baby, and the consequences of a long held secret. Audrey Hepburn is fresh and wonderful as the child who only knows what she has been told about her birth and eventual adoption by a frontier family. However the standout performance here is from Audie Murphy. It is his finest hour as the brother who finds out about his sister being an Indian, calling her a "red nigger". Vile words and he means them when he spoke them. In the end, all the family fights off the Indians who had come to claim the girl. I think that Murphy could have been a very good actor given the right material, and her he had it.

Released in 1960 - This big-budget Western, set in the mid-1800s, tells an uncomfortably awkward tale of hatred, racism, and intolerance. Its attempts to unveil the truth surrounding a 20 year-old secret that, due to one man's spite, is finally brought to light, is mean-minded and nasty.This grave secret directly involved the real heritage of Rachel (the Zachary's adopted daughter) who, now 20, was taken in by these well-respected ranchers when she was just a small baby.This film seemed to go out of its way to put Native Americans into a very bad light. Not only did it portray them as being very stupid warriors, as they managed to let 2 men and 2 women slaughter 40 of them in a matter of minutes - But it also had Rachel shoot down her very own Indian brother, at point-blank, while he stood there, facing her, completely unarmed.Spoken with venomous hatred, this film also contained numerous racial slurs, aimed directly at the Kiowa Indians. The name-calling even escalated to the point where the white citizens referred to the Indians as "n-i-g-g-e-r-s" on a few occasions.The Unforgiven abounded with plenty of over-acting, especially from Burt Lancaster who played Ben, one of Will Zachary's 3 grown-up sons. It sure seemed to me that Ben was of a very questionable character. For example - After being raised for 20 years as a brother to Rachel, he was now looking at her with carnal lust in his eyes while making plans to take her as his wife.I was very disappointed by this Western whose soundtrack music became so loud at times that it actually drowned out some of the dialog.

The word on the set is that John Huston, disillusioned at the way The Red Badge Of Courage was mauled by the studio more or less threw in the towel and was content thereafter to phone it in. Stories of him reading a newspaper on set and allowing his assistants to run the show abound and it is undeniable that he never made a half-decent film post-Courage. He had a penchant for assembling several heavy hitters, putting them in an under-written off-the-wall screenplay and snatching a suet pudding from the jaws of a soufflé. He did it with Beat The Devil and damned if he doesn't do it here as well. There's something of Duel In The Sun about The Unforgiven in that both turn a team of top talent loose on turgid screenplays. We wait a long time for the revelation that Audrey Hepburn is not, as she and the audience supposed, white, but a half- breed 'stolen' from the Kiawa tribe some twenty years previously. Rather sportingly the Kiawas wait the same twenty years before claiming her as one of their own. So much for realism. It's hard to work up much of a sweat for this ponderous entry which had the chance to confront racial prejudice in a serious fashion and spurned it.

See it - Not to be confused with Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven," this is one of, if not the best, of Burt Lancaster's westerns. Better than "Scalphunters" and "Valdez is Coming," but in my opinion not quite as good as the action-packed "Ulzana's Raid." The plot is very similar to "The Searchers," only it is about an Indian girl raised by whites instead of a white girl raised by Indians. The movie is very well made, the story is heartfelt, and Lancaster and co-stars Audie Murphy and Audrey Hepburn are fantastic. It is pretty slow, but the ending is worth the wait. The 20-minute shootout at the end is one of the greatest finales I've ever seen in a western. 3 action rating.