"Unforgiven" -- isn't Little Bill the good guy, ultimately?

Cafe Society
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WARNING: SPOILERS ABOUND!

This is one of my very favorite movies, for background. I’ve seen it at least ten times.
Anyway, when trying to think about the moral background of the movie, I’ve come to compare the two characters, William Munny(Clint Eastwood) and Little Bill Dagget(Gene Hackman).

The general vibe you get from reviews (which represent a first seeing, and this may be important) is that Little Bill is broadly “wrong”, in his actions. He’s even sometimes referred to as “sadistic”.

Its true that Little Bill engages in two acts of violence, as well as maintaining a somewhat “hard” demeanor through the entire film. His portrayed acts of violence are, first, to beat up English Bob.

I just viewed this very scene (its a great one – beginning with Bob chatting on the train, everyone reading newspapers about the assaination attempt on Garfield by Guiteau). When Bob (and his conspicuous biographer/dime-novel-writer, W. W. Beauchamp) arrive in town, Bob ignores the “no firearms” ordinance. He makes his presence known in town, and basically – its clear to all present that he’s there to kill the two cowboys and collect the bounty.

Its clear by this point that Little Bill (as sheriff, charged with the safety of the town and its environs) has been wary of the threat. He knows that word has been spread that there’s a $1000 reward to whomever kills the two cowboys. Whatever his personal reasons, he’s behaving in such a way as to do what he’s charged with – to enforce the law, to maintain order.

Bill responds to English Bob’s appearance by making a public spectacle. After Bob rebuffs Andy (a deputy) in his attempt to relieve him of his firearms, Little Bill confronts Bob coming out of the barbershop. After a lengthy back-and-forth of words (and once Bob has been disarmed), Little Bill beats the shit out of him. He makes a public pronouncement that there will be no assasins tolerated in Big Whiskey (the town). He believes that by coming down hard on English Bob, he can scare other potential assassins away, and preserve the peace.

The second act of violence by Little Bill is his beating of Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) during an “interrogation”. This, while being harder to justify, is still within the realm of Little Bill’s “operating space”, I would argue. He knows that Ned is a member of a party of assassins – I believe he knows that there are three – and he knows that the other two are still at large. He also knows that Ned is lying to him. Ultimately, we learn that Ned has died at Little Bill’s hand.

I think the fact that we don’t see Ned’s death is significant. Unfortunately, I don’t know exactly what it means. Was it the intent to…leave it ambiguous? We know that Little Bill was beating Ned, and had used a bullwhip. We know that he had threatened to become even harsher. I think all that we ultimately know is that Little Bill is a hardass, willing to use violence, and we have no way of knowing where he would “draw the line” on employing violence to achieve his ends.

Ultimately, and not to rehash the ending, we know what happens. Little Bill dies ignonominously. Does he deserve it, though? Hmm, thats what he said, and the answer does make you think. Here’s my point: I believe the movie leads us to root for William Munny, in the finale; I also believe this may be leading us astray. Its hard to justify what Munny did – most obviously, when he shot Skinny, in what was by far the most cold-blooded act in the film. Munny was also drunk, which I believe may be significant.

So, was Little Bill Dagget a sadist, or was he a good man in a bad situation? Was William Munny redeemed by his wife, or did he throw it away for whisky and cheap revenge?

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I’m with you on the worth of the film. I think it is magnificent and easily in my top five.
You do realise this may turn into an “unforgiven” appreciation thread.

Personnaly, I don’t think that there is a “good” guy in the traditional sense, everyone of them is flawed.
Without over-analysing, the impression I get is that it is almost impossible to escape what you are.
The trying situations you face will find you out in the end.
The kid and Ned were fundamentally good people who couldn’t handle their crimes.
English Bob was a liar, braggart and killer and his air of faux nobility couldn’t hide that.
Little Bill’s past was hinted at more than once. He is obviously a bad bastard who tries to be the upholder of the law but his brutality is undiminished.
William Munny was the worst of the lot. He had a brief flirtation with decency but the call of the money was too much and he reverted to type.

I absolutely love the scene where the young whore is relating the story of Ned’s demise to Munny.
She lays out what happened to Ned and the backstory to William Munny. All the while his eyes narrow and he starts at the whisky bottle as the kid listens on, appalled.

You can’t escape what you are, Munny couldn’t. Little Bill couldn’t. And they both end up paying it in one way or another. I guess the clue is in the title. That’s my take on it anyhow.

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My take is that there is no hero in this film, and that’s kinda the point. Little Bill is an evil sadist, who took the sheriff’s job so he had power over others. Munny is basically amoral, yes he’s supposedly doing it for his kids, then later his friends, but he has no problem doing whatever he wants, regardless of consequences.The only good characters are the prostitutes.

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Ooh – but are they good? The prostitutes at Greely’s set the whole thing in motion, because they couldn’t accept the justice they were offered, as it were. I definitely feel like theres a vibe that Strawberry Alice (the “leader”) pushed for a more violent frontier-vengeance. I cant think of her name, but the one who tells Munny about Ned’s death, of course, is the one who was assaulted in the beginning – I definitely got the impression she wasn’t gung-ho to put out a contract on the cowboys.

Perhaps she’s the true good-guy?

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Good point. It’s certainly a film about the varieties of evil, rather than of goodness. I can’t think of any character, other than the original victim, and Munny’s dead wife, who isn’t in some way corrupted.

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Mr. Beauchamp, perhaps.

He is the observer throughout much of the film, and his preconceived notions are gradually torn down as he sees the reality of the people he previously admired. English Bob isn’t the heroic figure he had been writing about. Little Bill teaches him about how to be a good gunfighter and lectures him about morality. But he then brutalizes Ned (appearing to enjoy it), and in the end is gunned down himself. When Munny kills everyone in the bar, it turns out to not be through experience, but luck that he shot in the right order.

Beauchamp was gradually shown reality, and was forced to accept it. He was perhaps stained through association, but in the end he became educated rather than corrupted.

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No the prostitute who was assaulted was Anna Levine. The one who rode out to give Munny the money (ha!) was a different girl.

As to the OP, while Little Bill’s actions may have all been reasonably justified as per his position and the times, there was clearly a large degree of narcissism and hubris in the character as portrayed. I agree with Steophan that the film is about corrupted and very conflicted characters. No character in the film is either completely good or completely evil. Even the cowboys that Munny, Ned, the Kid, and English Bob are after are not portrayed as monsters, but just dumb boys who got drunk and made one (very) bad decision. I see the film as an examination of the moral ambiguities of revenge, enforcing the law, and life in general in the Wild West.

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The ending of this film always annoyed me, that Munny was able to ride out alive. Are we supposed to see that as irony, since he got his reluctant accomplice Ned Logan killed? Or is it that Munny was the protagonist of the film, and thus the de facto hero? Maybe Hollywood/Eastwood wasn’t willing to kill off the lead? Whatever, it didn’t strike me as morally ambiguous, but morally confused.

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Novelty Bobble is right that this may turn into an appreciation thread and so be it. (More below.)

Recliner, in your OP you omitted the one act that may have tipped the scales against Little Bill which was displaying Ned’s corpse in front of the saloon with the “This is what happens to assassins” sign.

This hardly seemed like the word of warning it may have intended but instead the celebratory gloating of a sick bastard. That’s why there’s not the slightest hesitation by Munny in letting the inn keeper have it. And yeah, he should have armed himself.

That’s what makes this movie great. It is a complete upheaval of all of the cowboy clichés we’ve come to know and embrace.

The best one? When Beauchamp (a role Saul Rubinek hits out of the park) asks Munny how he determined the order in which he knocked off the gunslingers. This is a direct reference to Eastwood’s scene from Outlaw Josie Wales in which he explains in comical detail –though a dead serious (!) recounting in that film- as to how he could read the other guys’ eyes knowing who’s going to fire first, which one’s scared and so on.

My only problem with Unforgiven? It’s one of several films that when I’m clicking through the channel rotation, will make me stop and watch every time.

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This whole thing would have been handled well but for Little Bills misogyny. He basically gave little weight to the assault on Delilah itself and only fines the boys for Skinnys loss of income. When confronted, he says to Alice “It’s not they was bad boys…” “You mean like whores?” Alice says. So if Bill had whipped and banned them from the town, the girls might at least have felt like some kind of justice was done on their behalf and not taken things into their own hands. The most evil man in the film, Munny, is the only one who gives a damn about them. Part of his departing warning to the town was to not “cut up any whores, or I’ll kill every last one of you.”

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Historically in the old west, the line between lawmen and criminals was not as clear-cut as you might think. Working as a sheriff was just a job you did for a while, like mining or cattle driving, and many notorious gunmen did stints as lawmen — often to the regret of the towns that hired them. Little Bill doesn’t see any higher purpose to being a sheriff; he does the job as he sees fit, and in a way that suits his proclivities.

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I don’t think it was the movie that was confused at all. Indeed, I don’t think it was morally ambiguous, either; it was presenting amorality. The idea isn’t to question who is or isn’t moral; the idea is to present a cast of characters who all act in immoral ways, as opposed to most Westerns, which usually have clear-cut good and bad guys, whether white knights (most early Westerns) or antiheroes, like The Man With No Name.

13

I would say that the second cowboy (Davey?) is not corrupted, and is rather the victim of blind vengeance. His only crime that I can see is being aquainted with fellow cowboy with a small dick and big anger issues. He’s off banging a difference prostitute and not involved at all in the cutting. No reason for him to be whipped out of town. When he gets hit with the fine as well, he brings in two of the best horses from his string, and for that he gets pelted with shit. Then he gets gutshot and dies slowly and painfully. If anyone could truly say, “I don’t deserve this,” it would be Davey.

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Davey runs in and holds Delilah while the other cowboy slashes her face. “Davey! Come a runnin lad!” That’s evil enough to get gutshot, certainly in this movie.

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Nitpick: The second beating was delivered to Will Munny in the saloon. There was no real reason for doing so, as the man was obviously very ill and would be easily disarmed. It was, of course, a plot device to generate sympathy for the Munny character.

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Curse my faulty memory!

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Two thoughts:

Little Bill could have been the moral hero of the story if he weren’t so flawed. That is what the house building metaphor is all about. It is a worthy thing to build a beautiful house. Yet while Little Bill’s house looks nice it is severely flawed. It has an uneven foundation, it leaks rain and allows gusts to blow through, and it is taking Little Bill far too long to complete it. Likewise his attempt at establishing a system of justice in Big Whiskey, a noble act, is marred by his imperfect manner of carrying it out (many of the flaws have been mentioned by others). In this view Munny comes through and scours the town of an imperfect system that has begun to spiral out of control. Munny is evil, but a necessary one. He condenses into one night what might have been a decade long cycle of violence. The sheer horror of his act forces the actors to realize the flaws in Bill’s approach, and afterwards perhaps the citizens of Big Whiskey will make a better attempt at providing justice.

Another way to look at it is that there is no such thing as Justice. It is a human construct, and one filled with limits, contradictions, and imperfections. Perhaps we must attempt attaining a sense of Justice, but it will never work truly well. In this sense Little Bill is almost tragically noble. He is simply trying his best to serve mankind’s desire for justice. But no matter what he does he will fail (as will all who make a similar attempt). Nothing will give the prostitute’s face back, nothing can reverse time and take away her fear and pain, nothing can relieve her trauma. Little Bill comes up with the best approximation he can according the morals and morays of his time and place along with his own best judgment. But neither the victim, nor the perpetrators, nor any of the observers are happy with the outcome. Had he killed the two men (who didn’t themselves commit a capital crime), then it would have been their friends instead of bounty hunters plaguing the city of Big Whiskey. No, an attempt to establish justice is a lose-lose situation because while justice is a noble ideal, it is an unattainable one. After all, “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” (The most important single line of the film).

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I don’t think that is a nitpick, it is a major plot point. It shows Little Bill to be a coward and needlessly violent and once again, unjust, as he didn’t have reason to do so, despite his suspicion being right. Had his victim not help, he would have died.

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I agree that the whole point of the movie is that nobody is a hero. Munny is maybe the closest, because he does clearly see that his life is immoral and changes it; he relapses for the events of the movie, but we presume gets back on the straight and narrow afterwards (though whether he forgives himself is the question).

But I didn’t take Little Bill’s beating of English Bob as purely sadistic. Little Bill saw the choice of beating English Bob or having to kill (and maybe be killed by) either English Bob or the flood of assaissins that would follow. Better one beating than a bunch of killings, after all. Maybe he enjoyed the beating a bit too much, but I still think it was a decent choice given the situation.

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I think you’re making a mistake by trying to read any sort of moral argument into the ending at all. You’re attempting to fit the story into a moral framework that, in reality, did not exist in that time and place. That came later, when people like Beauchamp go back East and start mythologizing the frontier. When he writes the story, it’ll be the tragedy of a noble law man, cut down by assassins. Or the triumph of a rugged frontiersman over the cruelty and injustice of a small town. But all it really was, was a bunch of fucked up men, fucking up in a fucked up world. The reason Munny was able to ride out alive at the end isn’t irony, or a moral statement, or anything like that. He lives because nobody killed him.