Unforgiven

"She was a comely young woman and not without prospects. Therefore it was heartbreaking to her mother that she would enter into marriage with William Munny, a known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition.

When she died, it was not at his hands as her mother might have expected, but of smallpox. That was 1878."

William Munny (Clint Eastwood) is a hog farmer who travels the vengeance trail from Kansas to Wyoming, picking up a family of misfits in the process - a black farmer married to a Native American, a short-sighted kid with growing pains, a victimised young prostitute called Delilah - and learns to confront his own past along the way. That's the first half of Unforgiven (1992), and it closely resembles The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976); then, when Munny reaches his destination, he is transformed by circumstances into a superhuman avenger who steps out of a thunderstorm to shoot down five people before riding off into the wilderness. That's the last section, resembling High Plains Drifter (1972).

The themes of revenge, honour, justice, corruption, mythic heroes against reality and the central brooding and complex message of the non-glamorous, painful nature of gunplay and violence are well delineated. With Unforgiven Clint Eastwood casts a stark, objective vision on the realities of the West after the gunsmoke from decades of Hollywood westerns has cleared. The narrative de-mythologizes the grandeur and romanticism of the Western genre. There are no heroes in Eastwood's scheme, only men and women whose flawed spirits take their toll on the flesh, their own and others. There's good and bad evident in the best and worst of the people in Big Whiskey, but it's the darkness - the darkness of vanity, revenge, money and death - that Unforgiven emphasises. The revisionist narrative of Unforgiven reverses the progression of the earlier films by having its central character gradually revert to type as a gunfighter, instead of settling down in a little house on the prairie. It is as if Munny is reviewing the trajectory of the Western hero to take stock of how far the icon has travelled, eventually arriving at the heart of darkness. At the beginning of the film, Munny is always talking with regret and even contrition about the things I done in the old days, or the sins of my youth. There are running quips about Munny falling off his horse (I ain't really been in the saddle for a while), and about the fact that he now needs a scattergun to stand a chance of hitting anything. It is made clear that Munny has become a sensitive single parent to his two children, dislikes cruelty to horses as well as to women, and has generally adapted to a new age.

David Webb Peoples' script dates back to the mid-70's, written under the revisionist influence of The Wild Bunch (1969) and McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971). Unforgiven is punctuated with direct visual and verbal references to past Hollywood Westerns. Big Whiskey, with its snow-capped mountains in the background and its main street a sea of mud is just like the town in Shane. There are Rooster Cogburn-style cracks, Munny's two children are called Will and Penny (Will Penny is a 1967 Western starring Charlton Heston), and the final section of the film mirrors Wellman's The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). These references seem to anchor Eastwood's odyssey within a hallowed tradition, rather than undermine that tradition. The narrative adroitly employs many strategic devices: foreshadowing, irony, symmetry and symbolism (Hackman's hollow sense of home), dialogue that means much more than it says. From the beginning theme is tied to action (the whore's client turns violent because his manhood is mocked) and action to character. Its greatest strength is how it informs and above all is informed by the past.

High Plains Drifter, Eastwood's first Western as director, is a tight little parable about a crisis in a community. As gravestone inscriptions in the town of Lago (painted red and renamed Hell by the phantom drifter), the way Ernest Tidyman's script is submitted to distortion and distension, and fitted with Bruce Surtees' almost surreal images (and several twists of the ghostly revenge plot itself) makes clear Eastwood returns for reference to the popular Japanese cinema from which Sergio Leone first borrowed for the Dollars films. Lago is half-way between a Fordian pioneer settlement and the more abstract communities of Leone - townships where there's hardly any sense of townspeople, areas for factional disputes or cruel contests of cupidity. Lago has some of that strangeness - but the core of the plot has to do with the economics of the place, the secret that three businessmen have buried (for the good of everybody, that's the price of progress, as one of them says), and which leads to a flamboyant purgatorial punishment. And redemption: when the Stranger rides out, the town has been visited by hellfire but it's still standing; one of its most redeemable citizens, a midget, is writing the inscription on a murdered man's grave that will allow his soul - and the Stranger - to rest. The Outlaw Josey Wales is a remarkable film which starts out as a revenge Western: Eastwood sees his family massacred and joins the Confederate guerillas; after the Civil War, he is hunted by union soldiers while he pursues his family's slayer and a friend apparently turned traitor. But slowly the film changes direction, until through a series of episodes it becomes a story of a man who rediscovers his role as a family man, as he befriends Native Americans and various strays and leads them to a kind of paradise where they can forget their individual pasts. In many ways it reflects themes of Hawks' Red River(1948), but visually The Outlaw Josey Wales is closer to Anthony Mann in its breathtaking survey of American landscapes and seasons.

Vietnam also seems to have a direct influence over the narrative in Josey Wales - themes concerning the binding up of the wounds of the war. Part of it's richness is to do with a humanising of the Man with No Name and part with Eastwood's re-adaptation of the American Western, incorporating contemporary changes in society as metaphors - the genre had entered its own critical/apocalyptic/self-castigating mode, influenced by Vietnam, by notions of social banditry, and by changing views on how the West was won. In Eastwood's last Western before Unforgiven, Pale Rider(1985), all the elements of a revision of Western mythology were combined: the rugged location realism, Bruce Surtees' photography throwing shadows and gloom over everything, and a sense both of Westerns past (the child's attachment to an impossible hero, out of Shane) and of their recent rewriting (the plot, about miners trying to buck the system in a company town, is not unlike McCabe). What is original is a fresh perspective on the Western hero and the presence of Eastwood: the director has stylised his own incarnation to the extent that, instead of being a negative pole to which the other characters can react positively, he leaves enigmatic vacant spaces in the plot and thematic progression. Even as a wraith, a wish-fulfilment hero, the Preacher should connect more than he does. Is he another version (the spirit) of the heroine's missing husband; is he the alter ego of the villainous lawman he must ultimately confront? The most resonant connection between William Munny and the Eastwood icon is a sense of negation. That final disappearance, and prior to it the mystery of whom and what Munny is, exemplify an actor whose speciality is not being there. He is the Man with No Name in the Italian Westerns and a literal wraith in High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider. The American Western could never be the same, in its optimism, its Puritanism, its complacency, after Eastwood fused its with a European model, with a hero so extreme in his cynicism, his aloofness, his Latin ruthlessness. But for the Western, and Eastwood as an American director, to go any further, the Man with No Name had to be found a place, transformed, or simply revealed as someone who had no reason for being there.

"Those [the Spaghetti Westerns] were fun pictures, but they were stylised and operatic and the story didn't mean too much. It was mostly satire, with a character that comes along and events happen - the character really hasn't much feeling as to where he's been or where he's going. At least not to the same degree as a Josey Wales-type character, who's a victim and a warrior trying to escape conflict, but conflict keeps trailing him. Or like this character, William Munny, whose conscience is killing him."
(Clint Eastwood)

Unforgiven even more artfully raises questions about its hero, without on this occasion the pretence of the supernatural. And it convincingly describes a Western town as a violent, muddy hellhole, without pretending that it really is hell and that only an avenging angel can put the world to rights. At the climax of Pale Rider, when the devilish lawman who has been brought in to subdue the miners comes face to face with the preacher, there is a moment of recognition, which appears as two old adversaries squaring off for the last time, but is more like a man already dead confronting the spectre that has long haunted him. In Unforgiven, this recognition is a theme played throughout the film. It is, primarily, the relationship between William Munny, the ex-gunfighter who claims now to be a reformed character drawn back into violence only by hard times, and a sheriff known as Little Bill (Gene Hackman). Himself an ex-gunman, now a strict law enforcer who despises the cheap glorification of violence in dime novels Little Bill actually dispenses the most sadistic violence in the film.

Violence in Unforgiven diverts from the straightforward provocation-reaction narrative line that has characterised Eastwood's past work, taking a more deviously expanding and all-inclusive course. It begins when a prostitute in the mountain town of Big Whiskey, Wyoming, laughs at a cowboy's Teensy little pecker; he draws a knife and cuts up her face. The brothel madam, Strawberry Alice (Frances Fisher), thinks that hanging would be a fit punishment. When Little Bill, who is first going to whip the cowboy and his partner, decides instead to fine them seven ponies (because the brothel owner is mostly upset by the damage to what he considers property), the outraged prostitutes pool their resources to put up a bounty on the two cowboys.

Munny is approached with the offer by a cocky but shortsighted young gunfighter (Jaimz Woolvett); taking along his equally elderly ex-partner Ned Logan, he heads for Big Whiskey and a final orgy of violence. The hero is then, pulled along by other forces, other characters, much as he was in The Outlaw Josey Wales. But Unforgiven goes further, opening out doubts about what the hero has become, about what he was, so that the Josey Wales progression from farmer to killer to guide and potential farmer again becomes a series of circling conundrums.

Munny reminisces with his old colleague, Ned (Morgan Freeman) about when he was one crazy son-of-a-bitch and how he has nightmares of his past crimes. But through most of Unforgiven, Munny is protesting that he has reformed, that his dead wife Claudia had shown him the error of his ways, turned him into a virtuous husband, a caring father, and a hardworking farmer. His reminiscences with Ned Logan about the old days are recounted in horror at the shootin', drinkin', killin' fella he once was. This regret however, does not resonate with the Munny incarnation, to the extent that it is a relief when he eventually shed this reformed self, accepts the burden of the past that people keep thrusting at him - a known thief and murderer, the killer of women and children, more cold-bloodied than William Bonney -and takes the vengeance trail.

Munny identifies himself as he has always been remembered, conforming to his reputation as the meanest and most fearsome killer that he is expected to fulfill:

Munny: "I've killed women and children. I've killed just about everything that walked at one time or another, and I'm here to kill you, Little Bill, for what you did to Ned."

Munny's grim mission of moral revenge, in loyalty to Ned, metamorphoses him. He eventually does all that might be expected of The Man with No Name, and then he rides out of Big Whiskey, in a thunderstorm, as wraith-like as the Stranger or the Preacher. As he leaves, he emits a stream of curses and invective that suggests the black eminence of his legend, the hyperbole of his reputation that, in a final twist, he plays into with grim resignation: I'm comin' out! Any son-of-a-bitch takes a shot at me, not only gonna kill him, I'm gonna kill his wife! And all his friends…burn his damn house down! You better not cut up nor otherwise harm no whores! Or I'll come back and kill every one of you sons-of-bitches!

Unforgiven categorically acts to enhance the Eastwood persona. That persona is turned into a fully developed character - which means it is then opened up to other doubts and ambiguities, because for the first time this persona joins the same world as the other characters and is compared with and even doubled by them. Eastwood's William Munny could be the laconic and mercenary Man with No Name, now aged and mellow and mournfully looking back, finally feeling the pain his recklessness had caused others. Unforgiven trues hard to emphasise that it's heroic (rather than anti-heroic) protagonist is, as he puts it, just a fella now; I ain't no different than anyone else no more.

Unforgiven. The stark title, without benefit of an article, suggests a judgement as fully religious as in any other Eastwood film, and even more widely inclusive. Is Big Whiskey, and all who live there, less redeemable than the town of Lago in High Plains Drifter? The question doesn't arise. I'll see you in hell, William Munny, says the dying Little Bill, but we're not encouraged to think that Big Whiskey, like Lago, could stand in here and now for hell. It's no better or worse than could be expected, or as Munny sums it up for his younger companion, turning a sense of religious doom into mere pragmatism: We all have it comin', kid.

Reviewed by Adrian Gargett