And you will know him by the trail of dead... A review of Unforgiven, from Word magazine, March 2003. It’s the Western that Clint Eastwood made when he decided he had killed enough men for one lifetime.

Unforgiven
Director Clint Eastwood
Starring Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, Richard Harris

“I don’t deserve this,” croaks the dying man, bleeding on a saloon-room floor and gazing up at Eastwood’s smoking gun. Tiny-eyed, many-teethed, Clint spits back the last words his vanquished foe will ever hear: “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.”
    The moral of the story being, as Bruce Springsteen once sang, there’s just a meanness in this world. Maybe there are two basic types of Western movie: the Jon Bon Jovi and the Bruce Springsteen; the uncomplicated shoot-em-up and the brooding meditation on fate and character. Clint Eastwood is of course your man for the latter type of Western and he was never more Springsteen-ish than on 1992’s Unforgiven. He was specifically the Bruce of Nebraska’s title track: “Through to the badlands of Wyoming I killed everything in my path.”
    Eastwood, as we learn from one of the many extra features included with the 10th Anniversary DVD, picked up the script for Unforgiven after Francis Coppola’s option had lapsed, and duly banked the document away for his old age, knowing it was a role he would grow into. He was 61 by the time of its making, and claimed “It was everything I wanted to say in a Western.” He dedicated the movie to Sergio Leone and Don Siegel who had directed him in the “Man with no name” and Dirty Harry periods respectively, and indeed he plays a sort of composite of those two roles, burdened by the fatigue of age and a gnawing awareness of the prodigious body-count he’s left in his wake.
    We’re in a Wyoming brothel in 1880. An inexperienced young whore commits the *faux-pas* of giggling at her client’s small penis. He and a fellow cowboy retaliate by slashing and disfiguring the girl. When the town’s sheriff, played by Gene Hackman, lets the attackers off with a fine instead of a whipping, the prostitutes are furious and put a thousand-dollar bounty on their tormentors’ heads. Thus “the Whores’ Gold” attracts opportunist killers to the district. (One such, played by Richard Harris, is a blustering gun-slinger who is accompanied by his credulous biographer; they’re nearly irrelevant to the plot but symbolise the pulp-fiction beginnings of Western mythology, the same beast that Eastwood has wrestled throughout his screen career.)
    Enter, reluctantly, Eastwood’s character: a taciturn, flinty widower who has forsaken his violent ways for life as an honest but impoverished pig farmer. Only the prospect of money for his bare-footed children persuades him to join a callow, hot-headed bounty-hunter in pursuit of the two cowboys. The stage is set for a slowly-unfolding drama of vengeance that knows no proportion: once set in train, violence means the death of reason and, ultimately, of almost everyone who crosses Clint Eastwood’s path. In a world where only a bottle of whiskey will show a man some mercy, Eastwood represents a kind of justice. But he knows that with each life he takes he loses another piece of his soul.
    At the heart of Unforgiven is the fatalistic outlook of a natural conservative. We are what we are, and we are cursed to live out the consequences. “I guess he had it comin’,” says the young bounty-hunter of a freshly-slaughtered victim. “We all have it comin’, kid” replies Eastwood, bleakly. Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it. These are interesting themes, but they do not necessarily make great entertainment. Unforgiven paces its maze of moral ambiguities with a sure but ponderous step. Eastwood’s earlier work The Outlaw Josey Wales, though a cruder film in its way, is a much friskier ride through similar terrain. An evening spent with Unforgiven, especially viewed with its thoughtful DVD commentary, may be unforgettable, but keep your whiskey neat and prepare to pass that time entirely in a minor key.

Buy the DVD at Amazon.co.uk
Buy the DVD at Amazon.com