KILLING OFF THE MAN WITH NO NAME: UNFORGIVEN
In 1967, Clint Eastwood became a movie star by starring in A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS. Dubbed a "spaghetti" Western, this was director Sergio Leone's version of Akira Kurosawa's YOJIMBO (itself a samurai version of Dashiell Hammett's novel "Red Harvest"). Unlike the cynical, amused samurai embodied by Toshiro Mifune in Kurosawa's film, however, Eastwood's character, dubbed The Man With No Name, seemed little more than a ice-cold killer. It didn't help that Eastwood wasn't the most expressive of actors back then, preferring to go for still but making a left turn at wooden. Audiences embraced the character, however, and it turned up, in a different form, in the character of Harry Callahan in the Dirty Harry movies. Where The Man With No Name stood in for Western vigilante justice, Callahan took him into the 20th century, celebrating law and order.
But as Eastwood has grown older, he seems to want to either back off from those images, or explore them in greater depth. And in UNFORGIVEN, he finally finds a film to take his image as The Man With No Name and turn it on its head. The opportunity is thanks to David Webb Peoples, whose script Eastwood sat on until he felt he was old enough for the part. And he's certainly mature enough to make this film as well. To illustate by comparison to Eastwood's most famous predecessor in the Western genre, John Wayne, this might just be Eastwood's THE SEARCHERS.
Eastwood plays Will Munny, a former outlaw described in the opening titles as one of the baddest killers of them all, until he found the love of a good woman. She's died recently, however, and now Munny is struggling to raise his two children as well as tend the family farm. That's when the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) shows up. Schofield is a self-styled gunfighter (he gave himself his own nickname) whose father apparently rode with Munny, and he offers Munny a proposition. It seems a couple of cowboys got rough with Delilah (Anna Thomson), a whore, and cut her up (she laughed at someone with a small penis). Little Bill (Gene Hackman), the sheriff, responded by fining the cowboys, and the other whores, led by Strawberry Alice (Frances Fisher) are furious, so they've put a bounty on the cowboys' heads. Schofield thinks this is a good deal, and so he comes to Munny, believing him to be the best killer who ever lived.
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