Clint Eastwood – Man with No Name or Retired Gunfighter

**** This Post Contains Spoilers, a Lot of Them ****

Last week, I was watching Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dollars and live tweeting on #TCMParty. Someone asked how we thought modern westerns such as Unforgiven and Tombstone stacked up against the Sergio Leone classic. Now, I know I saw Tombstone, but I think what I most remember about it was it being forgettable. I know that with most modern westerns, my big issue is they tend to be like action movies except with six-shooters and horses instead Uzis and car chases or maybe action movies are just a modern version of the western shoot-'em-up. I said something to that effect but  that I was embarrassed to say that I wasn't sure if I'd seen Unforgiven. 

To be fair, some of Clint Eastwood's Westerns blend together on me. I know I've said to myself, I don't know if The Outlaw Josey Wales or High Plains Drifter, and then I watch them and go, Yeah, I've seen this. Anywho, we had the DVD of Unforgiven, so I popped it in and sure enough, Yeah, I've seen this. Great movie by the way. It's hard to say how Unforgiven compares to the Sergio Leone westerns. It's kind of like comparing apples and oranges. The Leone westerns are just so damn cool, and Clint Eastwood is perfect in them, but you don't get the sense that he is affected by anything in them. That's kind of the point. 

Unforgiven is completely different. In a way, you could look at Unforgiven as a loose sequel to the Leone man with no name films. Clint Eastwood's William Munny in Unforgiven is a farmer trying to raise his family alone after the death of his wife. His wife had married him as known thief and murderer, and as we soon learn an alcoholic as well. Yet she saw something good in him and turned his life around.

William Munny is not the man with no name, but if you think about it, he could be, if the years and a string of bad luck had combined with alcoholism to bring him down. Though the man with no name was a killer, he had a certain morality. Could it be that this was what Munny's wife had seen in him? In Unforgiven, William Munny is not making it on his own, so when a young gunfighter offers to team up with him to kill a couple of men who mutilated a woman, he is tempted.

At first, he turns the gunfighter down, but then realizes that the money he would earn is what he needs to do right by his children. Just one problem he is no longer the killer he used to be. It doesn't matter whether he is the man with no name or not, because he is no longer that man. Nor is he the known thief and murderer that his wife married, and he can't just go back to being a killer. Add to this the subplot of Gene Hackman and the dime novelist, who is learning that the folklore yarns he spins are just that, folklore. it gives Unforgiven a realism that is missing in Fistful of Dollars.

To be honest, I'm not a big fan of westerns just like I'm not a big fan most action movies. The standard shoot-'em-up premise of bad guy does something bad/good gets retribution doesn't hold a lot of interest for me. That said, there are many westerns that are great because of the way they tweak that basic premise. Let's look at some examples: 

**** More Spoilers Here ****

• Stagecoach (1939) – What makes it unique? The secondary characters, Clare Trevor, a dance hall girl, kicked out a town that no longer allows dance hall girls, Thomas Mitchell, an alcoholic doctor, Louise Platt, the pregnant wife of a cavalry officer, and others. Through the film we learn that the dance hall girl is every bit as moral as the cavalry officer's wife, and the drunk doctor is someone you can depend on in a crisis. Thomas Mitchell won an Oscar for his performance, in a year that is generally considered the greatest year for American film.
• The Searchers (1956) – John Wayne is out to get the Comanche savages who killed his brother's family and kidnapped his niece. What makes it unique? How about John Wayne being every bit as savage as the Comanches he's chasing.
• The Big Country (1958) – Gregory Peck is a sea captain who comes to the West to marry the daughter of a cattle baron. Gregory Peck as the fish out of water is what makes this unique, but his strength and integrity make him adaptable to any environment.
• The Magnificent Seven (1960) – A remake of Akira Kurasawa's, The Seven Samurai (1954), seven gunmen are hired to protect a poor Mexican village from bandits. Sounds like a standard shoot-'em-up and in some respects it is, but all of the gunfighters are fully fleshed out and all have their own compelling reasons for being there.  
• Fistful of Dollars (1964) – Again an unofficial remake (Leone didn't get permission) of a Kurasawa film (Yojimbo (1961)), Clint Eastwood's man with no name comes to a town where two rival families are fighting for control. Eastwood's character is brilliant in the way he two plays the two sides against each other, all shot with a style and finesse that is so good that you overlook the sometimes goofy overdubbing of the dialogue. The film has has a mix of English- and Italian-speaking actors all speaking their own language, so the Italian speakers were dubbed into English for the English language version, and vice versa for the Italian version.

I mentioned before that comparing Fistful of Dollars to Unforgiven was like apples and oranges. Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dollars as well as the other two films in the man with no name trilogy, For a Few Dollars More and The Good the Bad and the Ugly, are all done with a style and depth of character that they stand up to any western done before or since. Yet, the violence doesn't affect any of the characters, unless of course if it happening to them.  Unforgiven, though still a well-made movie, doesn't have the style of the Leone's spaghetti westerns, but the violence is real and has a profound effect on the characters, giving it a gravity lacking in Leone's films. Back to the original question, does Unforgiven hold up to Fistful of Dollars. In a completely different way, yes. Yes, it does.