#85: Unforgiven

Release Date: August 7th, 1992

Format: Streaming (Paramount+)

Written by: David Webb Peoples

Directed by: Clint Eastwood

4 Stars

Unforgiven is a simple movie of surprising depth. First and foremost, it is a well-made, well-acted, exciting western. The tale of William Munny, seemingly pulled by fate back into acts of vengeance and murderous violence, is captivating. His antagonist, Sheriff Little Bill, is a powerful, worthy adversary. And it’s all set in the largest expanses of the West that your mind can imagine, with a minimalist, haunting guitar score. It’s a great movie on movie terms alone. 

But the film also works well as a metaphor for Clint Eastwood, the performer. Having gained stardom for his role as the violent antihero in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western trilogy in the 1960s, and then reaching superstardom as possibly Hollywood’s biggest star in the 1970s, the early 1990s found Eastwood at a turning point in his career. Now in his early 60s, and largely muscled out of the action genre by names like Stallone and Schwarzenegger and Van Damme, Unforgiven marks a shift in Eastwood’s persona. Now he is the reflective elder statesman, if still a bit of a son of a bitch.

Unforgiven also offers an interesting, revisionist version of the American West. The violence is graphic, but not the stylized version offered by the Italians. Here it is blunt and harrowing: a shotgun blast to the chest, a man begging for water moments before his death, a whore having her face slashed by a knife. 

Speaking of whores, the film interestingly abandons the traditional “madonna-whore complex” found in Hollywood westerns. The “madonna,” the noble, pious, subservient female of traditional westerns, is dead in Unforgiven before the film even begins. William Munny’s wife is buried in their front yard, beneath a tree. The “whore” archetype, typically a conniving, selfish, destructive force who is good for nothing but a cheap lay, also doesn’t feature in Unforgiven. The prostitutes of Big Whiskey, Wyoming are portrayed as intelligent, enterprising, empathetic, and empowered. As for the sex, which is typically offscreen and largely implied by the western genre, it serves as the opening scene of Unforgiven, when a group of cowboys are shown having sex at a brothel, until one of them horrifically assaults a prostitute after she makes fun of the size of his penis. Throughout the latter half of the movie, there are also open conversations of sex and masturbation. This is not a John Wayne western. 

All of this, the movie and the performer and the genre, add up to a sum greater than its notable parts. We have a movie that, I think, becomes a metaphor of the American West itself: violent, contradictory, unrelenting, sentimental, mythological, and fated.