Unforgiven Review

Unforgiven works because Clint Eastwood spends the film dismantling the exact myth his own career built. William Munny is introduced failing to mount a horse, a killer of women and children by his own account, now a pig farmer who cannot shoot straight, and the film withholds the avenging gunfighter until the final reel precisely so we feel the horror when he arrives.

David Webb Peoples's screenplay, written years earlier and famously left almost untouched, is a machine for taxing violence: the Schofield Kid's collapse after his first real killing, it don't seem real, how he ain't gonna never breathe again, and Munny's reply that we all got it coming, kid, may be the genre's definitive exchange. Gene Hackman's Little Bill is the masterstroke, a sadist who believes himself the town's reasonable man, building a house with crooked corners while beating men half to death.

Jack Green shoots Big Whiskey in rain and lamplight, a west of mud rather than monument. The saloon finale gives the audience the catharsis the film has spent two hours poisoning, deserve's got nothin' to do with it, and sends the genre off with its own eulogy.