Unforgiven (1992)

With Unforgiven Clint Eastwood produced a sophisticated analysis of the emergence and spread of violence by skillfully breaking Western stereotypes with bitter irony. Not only the successful presentation of a topic, but also the reflection of a demythologizing film genre.

Clint Eastwood plays William Munny, once a notorious bad man, a killer of men, women, children, and anything else he didn't take a liking to. That is, until he met a woman who reformed him into being a better man. Many years have passed, and Munny's wife is long dead, leaving him to a life of farming and poverty with his two kids passing the time away quietly. He decides to take one last job when he hears of a $500 bounty offered by the madam of a brothel for the capture of a man who savagely beat one of her own. Munny joins up with his old partner Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) and the "Schofield Kid" who told him about the job (Jaime Woolvett). Their primary opponent is the sheriff of the town, Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman), a sadistic, dictatorial sheriff who enforces gun control on a tiny frontier town and is doing whatever he thinks is right. When he denies justice to the prostitutes of the town brothel, one of whom has been slashed by a client, the women hire Munny to gain vengeance. When Munny comes to town, everyone soon learns a harsh lesson about the price of revengeful bloodshed and the deformability of ideas like "justice." "I don't deserve this," pleads Little Bill. "Deserve's got nothin' to do with it," growls Munny, simultaneously summing up the insanity of western violence and the legacy of Eastwood's Man With No Name.

Due to the incredible cast, this movie is a masterpiece. Eastwood isn't alone in this endeavor; the normally affable Gene Hackman is downright scary, with his twisted sense of justice, doing evil things with complete justification in his maintenance of the law. Freeman and Harris are both terrific in supporting roles, avoiding the traps that could easily have made their respective characters not believable. The editing is also top-notch, developing the story the right way, taking time to build up interest in the characters before sending them off into confrontations. The build-up is slow, but the tension is high, particularly when it approaches the astonishing climax.

Unforgiven is a quiet Western, but also very profound, almost poetic, in its portrayal of a man how must content with his new moral code in the face of revisiting the life he left behind and sowing the seeds of his past to try to make his future a better existence. It's also a dark film, both literally and figuratively, with a noticeable lack of light during the gloomiest of moments. The movie won four Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Editing and Best Supporting Actor (Gene Hackman).