15 June 2010

Unforgiven

Gunslingers of the Old West

 

Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman play bad boys on horseback.

Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman play bad boys on horseback.

This essay is excerpted from Pop Culture versus Real America, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. A profile of a modern cowboy is here.

By Chester Pach

Unforgiven is a film about the Old West, a part of American life that vanished more than a century ago but that still has a grip on popular imagination. Clint Eastwood, who produced and directed the film, also stars as William Munny, “a known thief and murderer” who has given up his life of violence to become a hog farmer in Kansas. But in 1881, he straps on his gun one more time and makes an unsettling journey back into his past.

Munny leaves his farm to collect a bounty in Big Whiskey, Wyoming, where two cowboys used a knife to slash a prostitute, leaving her face horribly scarred. The local sheriff ordered the cowboys to compensate the saloonkeeper who ran the brothel by giving him some horses. The prostitutes were outraged and demanded justice. They offered $1,000 of their own money to anybody who would kill the attackers.

Munny at first refuses to seek the bounty. “I ain’t like that anymore,” he tells the Schofield Kid, a young gunslinger who admires his reputation for killing and proposes that they team up and split the reward. Munny changes his mind, however, because of the bounty. A widower with two young children, he hopes for a better life. He persuades another aging former outlaw, Ned Lawson, played by Morgan Freeman, to join him and the Kid.

The three bounty hunters track down the two cowboys. Munny kills the first after Lawson discovers that he can’t bring himself to pull the trigger. The Kid shoots the second. Things then go terribly wrong. The sheriff captures Lawson, beats him to death, and displays his body in front of the saloon. Munny goes to Big Whiskey to avenge his friend, killing five men, including the saloonkeeper and sheriff.

Vengeance and money provide no satisfaction. The Kid, who killed for the first time, finds murder isn’t so glamorous after all. “I guess he had it comin’,” the Kid says as he swigs whiskey and tries to overcome his feelings of guilt. “We all have it comin’,” Munny grimly replies.

At the end of the film, Munny leaves his farm and goes off to San Francisco to work in dry goods. The Old West becomes an even more distant part of his past.

Chester Pach teaches history at Ohio University, where he holds the title of Outstanding Graduate Faculty Member. He is the author of three books on U.S. politics and foreign policy. His next book, which will soon be published by the University Press of Kansas, is The Presidency of Ronald Reagan.

(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)