Well… yeah. The line you’ve quoted sums up what Muny is fundamentally capable of and why he came into the saloon to do some more of it. But the line quoted by Speak to me Maddie! sums up the theme of the movie.
Goddamn it, I’ve got too much on my plate to pop in my DVD copy tonight, but now I have to after this thread!
What a great film. Thanks, Dad for taking me to see in the theater in 92.
I think the point of the movie is the moral ambiguity of the characters and of the life. The real west wasn’t black and white and wasn’t full of black and white characters, it was filled with gray people who did what they had to and operated on more personal motivations.
Little Bill Dagget is a gunslinger who took on a sherriff’s job to retire and make a home for himself. The job is a role that pays him to settle down. And he does a decent job trying to clean up the town and keep it clean. The people generally respect him and what he does. But he has a violent streak, and he’s basically selfish. In the morals of his time and the situation he has, his beating up of English Bob in public serves a valuable purpose and is arguably justifiable. The old west wasn’t as much about law and order as it was about the right of might - who’s got the fastest gun. Sure, they wanted to be about law and order, but often law and order was carried out by whomever was handy or could be talked into it. Largely he was on his own, more of authority by personality and ability with gun than strictly by law.
At the same time, his treatment of English Bob in jail and the way he beats Ned are signs of his own sadism. He’s a mean, bad man who got a job as sherriff, and he does the best he can to carry out that job as he sees it. Which means he doesn’t regard the women, especially whores, as deserving of much justice in themselves, only what it means for the men involved. So the injury to the whore is a financial issue for the brothel owner, not a grievance for the woman whose face was disfigured and won’t be able to work. (So of course the whores go looking for their own justice, since “the law” didn’t give them any.)
But at the same time, he’s not evil. He doesn’t completely lord over the town. They don’t cower in fear of him. Contrast Hackman’s role in The Quick and the Dead, where Herod is a wealthy land owner who keeps the people of the town in fear, and every year holds a shoot off to allow them there measely attempt to hire someone to kill him (which always fails). Note how Little Bill beats down English Bob and makes a speech to discourage people coming for the bounty, but he doesn’t take any action against the whores themselves. He could arguably decide they are disrupting the peace and take some action against them, but he doesn’t.
And to some extent, he is aware of this himself. Witness all his lectures to Beauchamp trying to cut through the mythology about gunslinging.
Then there’s Bill Munny, who by all accounts used to be the biggest, baddest, meanest motherfucker this side of the Pecos. But he found love, and settled down and tried to reform. He took on the job with some prodding not because he really wanted to get back to shooting people, but because of his need for the money and to some degree a sense of justice behind it. You can see he is morally tormented by the decision, thus the whole fight with his alcoholism, and the shaking in the first bar scene, and getting beaten up. He is a changed man. He lets Ned off because he is a loyal friend, and takes on the role of killer when he originally just signed on to provide backup, because the young lad can’t see and Ned can’t be a part of it any more. And when he actually does the shooting, he limits the killing to the two under contract, and tries to be decent about the whole affair.
It’s only when his buddy Ned gets murdered and strung up in town that he finally unleashes his old self, his righteous indignation, his rage, and goes badass on the saloon owner and consequently the sherriff and rest of the posse. But even that is constrained - he gives people a chance to leave if they want. Yeah, he gives a quick word in the street about not cutting up any whores and all, but that comes across as after the fact justification to cover his own ass and perhaps provide a bit of protection to the women from retribution by the townfolk. And then he goes back to his life and his kids.
Nobody is evil. The cowboy who cuts the lady’s face is a thug with anger management issues, and certainly deserved some lesson in civilized behavior. The buddy, he’s a decent fellow in the wrong place with the wrong friend, who gets treated far more poorly than he deserved. Even the women aren’t evil, just looking for some sense of justice and some sense of safety. After all, the guy cut one of them up and as far as they’re concerned got away with a slap on the wrist. Certainly not a lesson he shouldn’t be cutting women, merely a lesson he shouldn’t damage someone else’s property.
This whole movie is about deconstruction of the Western, deconstruction of the stereotypes and archetypes and expectations.
Maserschmidt said:
No, as said you are reading too much into it. There’s no moral lesson about Munny or intended lesson of who is more right. He’s just the guy who survived. Largely because he was better at it than the other shooters, and with a bit of luck. He says as much to Beauchamp. He isn’t a hero or a villain, he’s just fulfilling his sense of justice for his little corner of the world, i.e. his buddy Ned. Just like Little Bill was trying to enforce his perspective, protect the townsfolk - including cowboys who make bad decisions.
Chefguy said:
Isn’t that done largely for the same reason he beat up English Bob? He knows or suspects Munny is there to be hired by the whores, so he preemptively sends another object lesson to the world at large.
I don’t think so. Munny was sick and didn’t look like a gunfighter. I think Little Bill was an asshole on a roll and beat him up because it was fun.
Just watched the movie again. This thread made me want to rent it.
In the scene in question, Little Bill comes to the bar because a deputy tells him three men showed up with guns. He clearly came to relieve them of their guns, and assumes they are there for the bounty. Plus, there’s enough talk in the bar that could be overheard.
He confronts Will Munny, and Will is definitely sick at that time, crouching in his chair and sweating. But Little Bill perceives him as a troublemaker - a man of low character. Sure, he beats on Will because he hates the type, but he’s also trying to send a message. That message is he doesn’t like “assassins” and other men of low character.
Note that Will did have a gun on him, and could have played innocent and handed over the gun, then claimed just riding through. Of course, we saw how that went for English Bob, so it’s likely Little Bill would have done the same for him.
I still think Little Bill’s primary motivation is he thinks they are shooters and wants to make a scene to make a point. Notice the conversation with Alice when she claims they were just passing through, and ducked out the window because they saw him beating up their friend.
The whole point of this movie is to deglamorize the western.
I think it’s fair to say that Little Bill may be a bit big on himself, and may enjoy beating on others, but he thinks he’s working for the good of the town and the townsfolk, and he’s generally trying to do right as he sees it. I think it’s fair to say that if anyone is in the right, it is Little Bill. Sure, he dismissed the women and their concerns too easily, and the attitude of the times didn’t give them much to begin with, but his primary motivation is to keep Big Whiskey cleaned up and free from trouble.
Will and Ned and the Scoffield Kid are there to kill those two cowboys. And they and English Bob are violating the law of the town carrying their guns in town, and not handing them over when first directed. Little Bill is ultimately enforcing the law. His beating of Ned is torture for the sake of finding the other criminals. He’s playing Jack Bauer to stop the time sensitive killers.
But like Bauer, he is willing to perform acts that are utterly inexcusable in any normal context. Unlike 24, Unforgiven doesn’t attempt to give Little Bill a blanket justification; he may be doing what he does in order to preserve law and order, but the manner in which he does it, and his background as a “bad man” suggest that the actions of enthusiastic purveyors of violence are of questionable justification regardless of their motivations. The irony is that Will Muny and Ned, who used to kill people just for the hell of it, are only reluctantly joining The Kid (who himself is driven by ideals of glory fed by the romantic writing of writers like Beauchamp) while Little Bill is barely restrained in his application of violence. In other words, the players of the game, whichever side they are on, are still participants in atavistic and often excessive acts of violence. Little Bill may be on the side of law, but he isn’t any more “good” than Will, Ned, and the Scofield Kid are “evil”; it is their acts, not their supposed nature, that defines them.
This film would play well with Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, which is the undisputed classic of Western revisionism. While Peckinpah’s use of graphic, bloody violence is credited with a breakdown of the Hayes Code and the depiction of hyper-realistic gore in film, in Peckinpah’s case this was intended to be subversive; that those who live by the sword must die by it, and while there may be a certain nobility in self-sacrifice, there is also a sad inevitability to it.
Stranger
The reason it’s revisionist is that it aims to undermine the entire mythos of the Western: Good guys vs. bad guys. It goes ridiculously out of its way to point out that there are no good guys, that everyone is bad in some way, etc. And to come from a director who is arguably best known for his work in the genre, it’s spitting in the face of the fans who made him rich.
Shades of Randolph Scott!
So who was the good guy in Fistful Of Dollars then? Or High Plains Drifter? He’s been doing this his whole career.
That is not revisionism. That is deconstructionism.
Revisionism is the attempt to rewrite history, not fiction. Classic Westerns didn’t portray the “real” late 19th century America, but a fabulous version of it with only slight more factual grounding that the adventures of Xena: Warrior Princess.
Also, as someone who loves classic Westerns, I didn’t feel spat in the face by Unforgiven. The movie is brilliant.
We are still talking about Clint Eastwood, right? The guy’s career was founded on the idea of undermining the mythos of the Western. That was the primary draw of his early films: they were a refutation of the sanitized, black-and-white morality of the Westerns of the previous generations, presenting a more violent, gritty, “realistic” vision of the Old West, one populated with criminals and largely amoral antiheroes.
Isn’t the High Plains Drifter some “Good Entity” sent to revenge Jim Duncan?
Josey Wales is a good guy, driven to be an outlaw in the manner of Robin Hood.
Actually his character in Unforgiven is not much different than his character in Pale Rider.
In both films, the character has a dark past. (In Unforgiven that is made explicit, in Pale Rider it is only hinted at.) In each case Clint begins the film as someone who is trying to live a good life to make up for past sins. And in each film he is driven by circumstances to return to violence as an avenging angel.
It’s spitting in people’s faces to make a quality movie that millions of them enjoy?
I’d say he is an “Avenging Angel” in The High Plains Drifter, but a mean son of a bitch in Unforgiven.
Although, Little Bill surely Needin’ Killin’.
You feel the only good Westerns are those with clear-cut good guys and bad guys? I suppose you must think that John Ford and John Wayne were spitting in the face of their fans when they made The Searchers - which subverted much of the Mythos that Ford and Wayne had created.
Deserves got nothing to do with it.
There is no morality. The wicked can go unpunished. The just can go unrewarded. There is no white hat or black hat there is only who shoots first and straightest and that is not something that makes the character cool, it is just why that character lives or dies.
Your “avenging angel” rapes one woman, forces himself on another man’s wife, robs the town blind, and then contrives to burn it down. His behavior is far from angelic in the modern Christian sense, although perfectly in line with the more traditional Abrahamic concept of angels, i.e. the memitim.
Stranger
Nitpick: Only the fallen angels engaged in sexual activity. Otherwise you’re spot on.
Or even moreso Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; a film in which Wayne plays the same prototypical tough guy hero persona but who comes off as loutish, crude, and outmotded in comparison to Stewart’s progressive and idealistic young lawyer. The Searchers makes Wayne look uncouth and bigoted, but Liberty Valance was the first film that explicitly undermined the mythology of the Western; that the men who saved and ultimately conquered the West weren’t the tough talking, hard living wranglers who kept the Liberty Valances at bay, but those who encouraged literacy, campaigned for statehood and democratic representation, and saw the rule of law win out over the rule of might. The final scene with with Ranse and Hallie leaving Shinbone on the train is most telling; Hallie married Ranse because he was the future of the West (even though she clearly loved Wayne’s Doniphon more, yet Ranse’s success as a senator was predicated on a lie of his prowess in being the eponymous champion. Far more than The Searchers it is a complete evisceration of the mythical heroic Western in that the heroes are who you think they are, but not for the reasons they should be by genre conventions.
Revisionist films are good (when done well) because they play with the conventions of the genres they are revising and the expectations of the viewer. Films like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Wild Bunch, and Unforgiven challenge the viewer to think about the story in a larger context than just the story itself. Far from “…spitting in the face of the fans who made him rich,” it is extending and exploring the fundamental underpinnings of genre fiction in a way that relates more readily to the viewer’s everyday experience. Of course, some viewers don’t like to have those preconceptions challenged and want a merely superficial entertainment. There is nothing wrong with that–some of the best films every made are well-crafted but thematically shallow movies–but investigating one’s own prejudices and expectations is a hallmark of intellectual curiosity.
Stranger