Directed by Clint Eastwood

Written by David Webb Peoples

Unforgiven is one of the best westerns ever made, ranking alongside Little Big Man, The Searchers, High Noon, Dances With Wolves, Shane, and The Oxbow Incident--all of which you should see, if you haven’t already. Directed by Clint Eastwood very faithfully from an astonishing screenplay by David Webb Peoples (whose credits include Blade Runner and Twelve Monkeys), Unforgiven won four Oscars, for Best Picture and Director (Eastwood), Best Supporting Actor (Gene Hackman) and Best Film Editing (Joel Cox). It was nominated for and should have won the award for best screenplay as well: in telling an apparently simple story of revenge and murder, it in fact weaves in deep levels of psychological and philosophical complexity, religious allusion and allegory, and indelible, unique characters. It’s simply in a class by itself; written in 1976, and reflecting the dark, post-Vietnam mood of the country, it was optioned by Francis Ford Coppola, who eventually couldn’t get it financed (strangely enough, Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula came out the same year as Unforgiven and won three Oscars in technical areas). Eastwood optioned the script in 1985, but waited half a dozen years before finally making it in 1992. I remember him saying something along the lines that he had kept the script in his pocket like a fine gold watch, until he felt that he was ready to take it out and do it justice.

 

Westerns are by their nature morality plays. They use the concept of Manifest Destiny and the open range, of the still unsettled or recently settled frontier, to dramatize the conflicts between civilization and the natural world, and between individual freedoms and communal restraints. Over time, as moral sensibilities have changed, so have western movies. Early on, for instance, Native Americans were portrayed either simply as dangers to noble white settlers that had to be exterminated and overcome, equivalent to the threat of wild animals or other natural obstacles, or else as “noble savages” living in a state of admirable but not fully human innocence. Later they became symbols of a just and ecologically minded people about to be destroyed to the depredations of greedy, invading white newcomers. More recent westerns with Native American characters have been a bit more complex and historically accurate, depicting both the European Americans and Native Americans as mature cultures each capable of extremes of cruelty and bad behavior, but driven on the European side by prejudice, avarice, and a sense of moral superiority, and competing on unequal military terms for control of the continent. Of course, not all westerns have Native American characters, but they are still concerned with moral dilemmas, in which the Old West—and in particular the western town—is a metaphor for the country as a whole. In High Noon, the abandonment of the town’s brave marshal (Gary Cooper) as he waits to confront a villain arriving on the noon train was a metaphor for the moral cowardice exhibited by many “upstanding citizens” in the face of the McCarthy hearings and the Red Scare. Similarly, The Oxbow Incident has a posse looking for a murderous rustler rushing to judgment before they have all the facts and hanging an innocent man. In Shane, the theme of pacifism versus the use of force is played out. Shane, a gunfighter, personifies force, and emerges as a regrettable necessity in order to ensure justice, but also as something that needs to “ride off into the sunset” once justice has been achieved.

 

Eastwood’s earlier, great Spaghetti westerns, either those directed by Sergio Leone or by himself, are expressions of fundamental individualism, often drawing on the Zen Bushido of Japanese samurai epics; Society, such as it is, is a violent and dog-eat-dog affair, with the protagonist succeeding because he’s smarter, faster and tougher than his opposition. In High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider, the individual becomes a vindictive spirit, a nemesis, as if Gary Cooper’s marshal in High Noon had been killed and come back to exact revenge on those who either were responsible for his death or did nothing to prevent it.

Unforgiven draws on these earlier iconic films, but adds layers of ambiguity, self-doubt, questions of fate, destiny and moral complexity absent in almost any of its predecessors. The plot is deceptively simple: in the Wyoming town of Big Whiskey, a cowboy cuts up a prostitute’s face after she laughs at the size of his penis. Strawberry Alice, the “Madame” of the saloon, demands justice in the form of a bullwhipping, but the saloon owner is only concerned about the scarred whore’s lost value, and the town’s sheriff, Little Bill, agrees that’s what matters. He tells the cowboys to hand over some horses in compensation. Alice, furious, lets it be known there’ll be a thousand dollars for anyone who kills the cowboys, and this news reaches reformed, broken-down gunslinger William Munny in the person of a young would-be desperado who calls himself the Schofield Kid. The Kid wants Munny to partner up with him to get the reward. Munny’s wife is dead, he needs the money, and he finally agrees to join the kid as long as his old partner Ned can come along. Meanwhile, Little Bill, trying to prevent the killings, mercilessly beats those he suspects of coming to collect the reward. In the end, Little Bill’s violence leads to Ned’s death and his own destruction at Munny’s hands, along with many others.

 

The title itself begs the question of who or what is unforgiven—is it Eastwood’s William Munny, the former gunslinger and drunk who was “reformed” by his now dead wife, but whose name itself is a signifier of venality? Or is it Little Bill, the former gunslinger now enforcing an authoritarian pacifism on his town? Does it refer to the prostitutes who offer to pay to get justice as they see it, with the murder of the men who disfigured one of them? Or to the cowboys who attacked the woman? Or is Big Whiskey itself unforgiven, its name an ironic reminder of the debauchery of Munny’s past, and to which he now returns as a nihilistic destroyer? Perhaps forgiveness is not a possibility at all, not even a real part of the moral universe, as Munny implies just before murdering Little Bill: “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.” Or does it? Reflecting on his past crimes, Munny remembers one man he shot to death who didn’t deserve it. Munny’s African-American friend Ned (Morgan Freeman) used to be a killer, but isn’t anymore, and he backs out of the deal now—so does he deserve what happens to him? Little Bill, as genial as he is, is something of a monster, brutalizing anyone he feels endangers the peace of his town, and whipping Ned to death in what Morgan Freeman described as “the Rodney King scene.”
 

As noted, laced throughout the story’s meditations on violence and death are what amount to religious parables: for instance, after Little Bill has nearly kicked Munny to death, he hallucinates that he’s seeing the angel of death, and upon awaking after his three days in hell, so to speak, he looks up into the scarred face of the cut-up whore Delilah and thinks she’s an angel. She brings him back to life and a renewed appreciation of the beauties of the world, her own included. They have a wonderfully delicate conversation in which Munny refuses her offer of “a free one” (sex) because of his wife, who is “watching over” his little ones back home. She’s dead, but Delilah doesn’t know this, and clearly Munny thinks of his wife as an angel. But his redemption is short-lived. When Munny learns of Ned’s death, and that his friend’s corpse is being obscenely displayed to the public as a warning to others in search of the “whore’s gold,” Munny begins drinking whiskey again, and becomes the angel of death himself, wreaking vengeance on the entire town of Big Whiskey.

 

The story isn’t just about violence and guilt, or redemption and revenge. It’s about the short-sightedness of pursuing ill-won gain (the Schofield Kid is literally near-sighted, and comes to realize almost too late that he’s been on a fool’s mission). It’s about what it means to pull a trigger, or build a house, about fame and friendship, and about fear and mortality: After the Kid has shot one of the cowboys point blank as he was taking a shit, Munny and the Kid sit under a lone tree, under an ominous sky, and the Kid tries to come to grips with what he’s done. Munny tells him, “It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he’s got, and all he’s ever gonna have.” The Kid tries one last bit of bravado: “Yeah, well, I guess they had it comin’.” To which Munny simply says, “We all have it comin’, kid.” The movie is also about (to quote scripture) how the love of money is the root of all evil. There is a truly excellent analysis of this aspect of the film published online by Lucasfilm’s J. W. Rinzler, who noticed the seemingly unlikely inclusion of Unforgiven in a French Marxist film festival and then decided to examine the film as a critique of raw capitalism; I encourage you to check it out here.

Unforgiven also marks an important milestone in Clint Eastwood’s career, when he transitioned from roles that had become somewhat caricatured, such as the later Dirty Harry movies, the orangutan movies, and so on, which seemed to indicate that his career was in decline. Unforgiven instead became the finest film he’s ever made, and heralded the beginning of his remarkable second phase as one of the most important directors of our time. For these, and many other reasons you’ll discover when you watch it, or watch it again, Unforgiven is a movie you gotta see.




Movie Review Editor Robin Russin.