Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven: The Perfect Swansong for the Western Genre

Westerns were the superhero movies of their day. Cowboys and gunslingers dominated multiplexes in the ‘40s, ‘50s, and early-to-mid-‘60s. Audiences lined up around the block to see John Wayne and Randolph Scott and Henry Fonda racing across the frontier to bring outlaws to justice. But after the Kennedy assassination and the Vietnam War and the Nixon administration deromanticized the American Dream and disillusioned the American people, the myths of the western genre lost their magic.

In the late ‘60s going into the ‘70s, the black-and-white, good-versus-evil tales of Stagecoach and Rio Bravo and Johnny Guitar were replaced with the darker, bleaker, more morally ambiguous stories of The Wild Bunch and McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Once Upon a Time in the West. These “anti-westerns” revised the mythology of the Old West and shined a harsh light on the brutal historical realities of the United States. But, eventually, even revisionist westerns went out of fashion, and audiences moved on.

Over the past 40 or so years, the western genre has practically died a death. We still get the occasional western gem, like Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained or Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, but the genre’s heyday is well and truly over. Tombstone was the last gasp of the traditional old-school western, but, one year earlier, Clint Eastwood’s 1992 masterpiece Unforgiven made the entire genre obsolete.

Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven Was The Perfect Swansong For The Western Genre

John Wayne and Clint Eastwood are like the Batman and Superman of western movies. They’re the two defining icons of the entire canon, and they each represent two ends of the spectrum. Wayne represents the traditional, clean-cut western hero who always defeats the bad guy and never backs down, while Eastwood represents the morally gray antiheroes: the bounty hunters, the vigilantes, the outlaws. They’re both legends of the genre, but Eastwood has one leg up over Wayne. Eastwood isn’t just one of the most iconic western movie actors; he’s one of the best western directors, too.

Whereas Wayne only directed two movies in his whole career, and neither of them are masterpieces, Eastwood directed some of the greatest westerns ever made: Pale Rider, High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales. In 1992, Eastwood directed his final western, Unforgiven, and it was such a genre-defining game-changer that it could’ve been the final western ever and it would’ve been a perfect swansong for the entire canon.

Unforgiven begins with a brutish john disfiguring a sex worker’s face, then getting a slap on the wrist as punishment. Seeking retribution, the madam puts a $1,000 bounty on the cowboy’s head. The self-proclaimed “Schofield Kid,” who boasts about being a notorious bounty killer, visits William Munny (an actual notorious bounty killer) and offers to split the bounty on this knife-wielding cowboy. Munny, played by Eastwood himself, is a retired, widowed, repentant gunslinger trying to leave his life of violence behind and lead a peaceful existence with his two children on a hog farm, so he’s initially hesitant to take the job.

But he needs the money. His farm is failing, his kids are starving, and he could really use his share of that bounty. So, he recruits his old partner-in-crime Ned, played by Morgan Freeman, and they hit the road.

Unforgiven Is A Bleak Deconstruction Of The Tropes Eastwood Helped To Create

Unforgiven deconstructs all the tropes that Eastwood helped to create. Early in his career, when he was playing characters like the Stranger and the Man with No Name and the outlaw Josey Wales, Eastwood defined a certain on-screen persona that not only made him an icon, but also shaped the genre. Eastwood inspired the creation of a whole wave of cold-hearted gunfighters, from Boba Fett to Solid Snake to Roland Deschain to the Ghoul to the Mandalorian. So, he was the perfect person to deconstruct that archetype.

With the character of Munny, Eastwood essentially imagines how a guy like the Man with No Name would end up in his old age. The young, roguish badass we saw in A Fistful of Dollars would grow up filled with remorse, crushed under the weight of his own guilt.

As with almost every other western, Unforgiven culminates in an armed standoff between the hero and villain. But it’s not as black-and-white as the usual western showdown. There’s an undeniable satisfaction in seeing Gene Hackman’s brilliantly hateable villain, Little Bill, meet a gruesome end. But it leaves you feeling conflicted, too. Munny seals his fate — he’s not a hog farmer; he’s a ruthless killer — and doling out vigilante justice doesn’t make him feel any better about all the blood on his hands.

Unforgiven Exposes The Dark Side Of The Western Myth

The western genre is built on the myth that heroes will always step in to defeat villains, but Unforgiven exposes the dark side of that myth. The kind of “hero” who would step in to kill a bunch of people at a moment’s notice probably isn’t much of a hero at all. Shane touched on these ideas way back in 1953, in what is now regarded as one of the greatest westerns ever made, but Unforgiven took those ideas even further.

Unforgiven looks at the other side of that coin, too. Munny might be a killer, but at least he stands his ground and follows through on his threats; at least he’s not a coward. The Schofield Kid, on the other hand, is a coward. He’s a fraud, just like McCabe. He’s all talk; he claims to be a cold-blooded badass, but when push comes to shove, he can’t bring himself to pull the trigger. It was the perfect way to deromanticize the western genre’s bloodshed. It might look cool on-screen, but it doesn’t feel good for the people doing it.

Eastwood swept the Oscars with Unforgiven; he won Best Picture and Best Director, and he was nominated for Best Actor, and it’s easy to see why. This is the culmination of a legendary filmmaking career, both in front of and behind the camera, and the culmination of one of the quintessential Hollywood movie genres. Very few films have earned their place in the annals of cinema history quite as aggressively as Unforgiven.