Unforgiven (DVD)

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My favorite Clint Eastwood Western remains "The Outlaw Josey Wales," but I can't argue that "Unforgiven," Eastwood's 1992 Academy Award-winner, isn't close behind and among the two or three last great Westerns Hollywood has produced.

"Unforgiven" is producer-director-star Eastwood's and writer David Webb People's attempt to demytholigize the Western, to present the Old West on film as something closer to what it might really have been. Thus, you will find no heroes here, nor any true villains.

The main character, played by Eastwood, is William Munny, a widower with two small children, living off the land in a little mud hole in the middle of the Kansas plains. But it wasn't always so with Munny. Some ten years earlier, he was a "rootin', tootin' son-of-a-bitchin', cold-blooded assassin," a drunkard, a thief, and a murderer by his own admission. But he found a new life in the bosom of a good woman who showed him the error of his ways and set him on a new and sober course before succumbing to smallpox on their prairie farm.

Now, life is tougher for Munny than ever before, and when a young gunslinger, the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett), comes by offering to share a thousand-dollar reward with him if he'll help him kill a pair of cowboys, Munny goes for it. But Munny insists he's a changed man, reformed, and is only doing the killing for the money; not like the old days when he would do it for the pleasure. And Munny is especially persuaded to do the job when the Kid explains that the cowboys they're going after cut up a defenseless prostitute, and her fellow harlots are putting up the reward for the perpetrators' deaths because the law would do nothing to help them.

Munny hasn't been on a horse in years and can hardly handle a gun anymore, but that doesn't stop him. He needs the cash. More important, he sees the killing of these miscreants as a kind of redemption for him, a distorted good deed for a life of iniquity. He hooks up with an old pal from his outlaw past, Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), who has also forsaken the gun and turned to farming, and together the three men ride out like avenging angels, or knights errant, to right the wrongs of a harsh and uncaring world.

But, as I said, life is tough for Munny, and things are not so simple as their merely shooting two men dead and collecting their money. The two cowboys they're after are holed up on a ranch just outside a little town whose sheriff, Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman), is a strict law-and-order man, a guy who believes that any means are worth the end. Daggett is a bully and coward who commands respect with the help of a passel of deputies and guns and administers his own brand of justice once he disarms a man. Little Bill isn't about to have any bloodshed in or around his town.

Along the way we also meet a writer, W.W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), an Easterner come West to find grist for new dime novels. He's looking for gun-toting heroes, and if can't find them, he creates them. Lately, he's spinning yarns around a British fop of a gunslinger who calls himself English Bob (Richard Harris). Yet nothing is as it seems.

The movie depicts the West as a largely dirty, brutal place, at least the areas inhabited by Man, with the movie's characters all ordinary people with ordinary weaknesses. Munny himself is neither a good bad man nor a bad good man; he's simply a man. This is the deglamorized version of "Shane," where not the fastest draw but the calmest demeanor and the steadiest hand wins the gun battle. Likewise, Sheriff Daggett is no common heavy; instead, we see a person who truly believes in what he's doing to keep the peace, no matter how violent it may seem to us. It's been said the movie also displays themes of antiviolence and women's lib, but these are only peripheral issues in a story that basically tries to proffer a different slant on a traditional genre.

Yet for all its attempts at debunking the conventional Hollywood Western, "Unforgiven" remains an orthodox example of the breed. It maintains Hollywood's strict "Code of the West," where courage and loyalty reign supreme and the protagonist faces off with the antagonist in one big, final showdown. William Munny may be older and more grizzled than Eastwood's seminal Western hero of thirty years before, but, make no mistake, underneath it all he's still Sergeo Leone's "Man With No Name."