Next to the short yet powerful life lesson “Deserves got nuttin to do wit it.”
Common W.W. Beauchamp is ok, just a bookworm city slicker in way over his head.
“I was gonna make espresso.”
Will Munny would shoot a blind man without a second thought.
Well, he got the old Will Munny’s skills back after the beatdown from Little Bill. After he recovered, he pretty much led the team, and he was the one who finally killed the first cowboy - Ned just hit his leg, but Will shot him in the belly. But you’re right, he got Will Munny’s soul back when he heard Ned was dead.
And Will Munny is much worse than the Man with No Name. Sergio Leone’s Clint wouldn’t have killed women & children.
“I’ll bet you think I’m kickin’ you, Bob.”
One of Hackman’s best characters, in a career full of them.
I believe him to be a bully and an asshole. Speaking to the reporter is merely the behavior of a braggart, the bully showing off to a new follower.
Stones he may have when he’s kicking a guy with the flu, and he may keep them when threatened yet surrounded by his minions, but he’s an evil bastard. He reminds me of the cops here in Jericho, Arkansas who made the news recently, terrorizing the populance to get fines for speeding tickets. 
I can tell you whose gonna be last.
Bully, asshole, braggart - also sadist. Also fearless ( facing down Munny in the bar with a shotgun pointed at his chest ) and very dangerous ( even if you don’t accept this from his minion-backed beat downs, the extreme caution with which a contract killer like English Bob treats him speaks to this ). He’s interesting in that he’s a complete monster who represents law, order and ( roughly ) civilization.
Other than his initial asshole move of not demanding some appropriate compensation ( like a lawful trial for starters ) from the knife-wielding cowboy vis-a-vis the maimed prostitute, which partially precipitates what follows, he’s technically mostly in the right. Vigilantism can’t be tolerated, disarming visitors in such a tense situation is reasonable, murderers need to be hunted down. He just goes about this lawful business in the most cheerfully sadistic and brutal manner possible.
Maybe by the end. I’m not sure if he has learned his lesson. He is there to cash in on, the myth of the wild west, and of course he gets the real deal. What sort of book does he publish down the line?
yeah
I quote Robyn Hitchcock:
In Unforgiven
He was totally mean
But when he got his
I really felt for Gene
But don’t talk to me about Gene Hackman
Well, figure he writes the flowery language at the beginning of the film and the flowery language at the end…
Pissing down your pant leg would lead one to write all the more realistic. In the beginning Beauchamp writes like he does because he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, when it’s all over he’s seen what a gun fight looks like and what it ends like. I think like The Schofield Kid he’s learned what it means to kill a man and he’s never going to want to see it or romanticize it again.
I disagree. As soon as the real gunfight ends, Beauchamp rushes over to Munny and starts asking what order he killed 'em in – by explaining what an experienced gunfighter would do when surrounded by superior numbers, and brushing past Munny’s “is that so…” to start cheerfully deducing who Munny would’ve killed first, and who could have been next, all according to what Little Bill had told him before the gunfight.
Maybe it’ll sink in later, but I see no indication that it’s sunk in when last we see him.
Yup. Beauchamps next book will be about Will Munny and will describe the shootout with terms like, “Steely gaze,” “Blazing hot lead,” and “lighting fast…”
Little Bill was a bully and braggart. His talk was all about how and he and English Bob were the real deal and how he couldn’t stand posers. His law enforcement goals were admirable but his methods were excessive. Once Bob and Will were disarmed, Bill should have let them be. His biggest fault was his disregard for the whores for being,well, whores. His idea of justice wasn’t even on behalf of the victim. He just “fined” the boys so that their pimp could get compensated.
One aspect of the film that I really liked was the realistic way that issues were simply left unresolved. Poor Delilah ended up thinking that Will was lying to her about not wanting a free one. The only people whose stories are resolved are the dead ones.