Defining Favourites: Unforgiven (1992)

Clint Eastwood pays tribute to his masters in his most acclaimed western.

Photo: Warner Bros.

Welcome to my Defining Favourites, a section dedicated to essays about films that I feel confident in calling favourites in some way or another - akin to Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” reviews. These essays are for paid subscribers, so if you would like to read more beyond the free preview, please consider subscribing.

Directed by Clint Eastwood
Screenplay by David Webb Peoples
Produced by Clint Eastwood
Starring Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, Richard Harris, Jaimz Woolvett, Saul Rubinek, Frances Fisher
Premiere Date: August 3, 1992
Running Time: 131 minutes

When Clint Eastwood had directed Unforgiven, he had done so believing that it would be his final western at the time. But it’s also a movie built upon reckoning with that legacy he’s left behind on the screen after having been made into a household name thanks to his association with the western genre. Like the John Ford films that had defined the classic Hollywood’s idea of the western and the reinventions that had since come along with Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, there’s a lingering melancholy throughout Unforgiven that puts us in the place of someone whose life had been defined by this own career on the screen and behind the camera too. For Clint Eastwood, it’s a moment to reflect on how the fun times simply cannot be made to last forever.

Thus a movie like Unforgiven is born out of wondering how an artist who had made their name through said genre ultimately sees his own place in a constantly growing world. Through films that range from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly to The Outlaw Josey Wales, Eastwood has become a very distinctive screen presence as the western hero – but William Munny is a far more complex character than what meets the eye. William Munny is a murderous outlaw who has killed people of all sorts, but when we’re introduced to him, it feels as if he has mellowed out, trying to take pleasure in a simpler lifestyle as a farmer. It’s a perfect analogue for Clint Eastwood to see himself within, because Munny isn’t so much a traditional hero as much as he is the antithesis of such – and it creates a more tragic background for Unforgiven in turn.