Hence the quotation marks. 
I love this movie.
Muny as a sympathetic character? Even when I saw it the first time I saw Muny as a very bad man. I took seriously the stories of him killing kids and killing people for no real reason. He was a very evil, dangerous man who, for some reason, decided to try to straighten up. However, it was extremely hard for him and while you can give him credit for trying he did find an excuse to go back to his old life.
Even if you believe Little Bill deserved to die, when Muny walked out he put a shotgun blast into a groaning man on the floor on his way out. Muny was BAD. If he died that would have been a good thing.
The thing I got out of this movie was that there was all this violence and it accomplished NOTHING. Even the stories of 2-gun (tommy?) and the French lady and English Bob were just so freakin stupid but filled with violence. The whole thing started out with a violent act and could have been nipped in the bud if Little Bill would have just treated it seriously and punished the whore cutter.
All that violence and nothing good came from it. Everyone suffered. I walked away thinking there has to be a better way
In Pale Rider, “The Preacher” is pretty explicitly indicated to be some supernatural retribution against Stockburn–sort of a Shane with apocalyptic overtones, while Will Muny in Unforgiven clearly a mortal man who just has some sadistic, brutal tendencies when he gets riled up.
Stranger
Yeah but he’s more complicated than that. Remember his kindness toward the whore, and how he tells her a white lie to spare her feelings. Also, he could have kept all the reward money for himself, but took pains to make sure it was divided properly. He is not just a “bad man.”
My sense was that Muny was a violent drunk, and that was the explanation for his past behavior. Notice that he started hitting the bottle hard at the end.
What part of the movie do you think pretty explicitly indicates a supernatural origin? Because I disagree. The Preacher has a past. A human past. It is made clear that the main hired gun knows him from some time in that past. He asks about him in detail, and seems worried as it dawns on him who The Preacher might be. And then when he finally sees the Preacher face to face his eyes go wide and he says “You!” just before he draws his gun.
So the Preacher is someone with a violent past.
As a big clue, the movie is named Pale Rider, and the eponymous character is introduced in crosscut with Penny reading from Revelations Ch 6 V 7-8 about “And behold, a pale horse, and he who sat on it, his name was Death,” i.e. the pale rider. Second, by the scars The Preacher’s wounds were clearly mortal and Stockton seems utterly surprised to see him alive; he indicates earlier in the film that while the man at the camp matches the description of an old enemy, the man in question was dead and could not be the same person. The movie itself contains a large number of Biblical allusions, particularly Revelations, including The Preacher having apparently returned from the dead to confront the seven deputies. In fact, it would be hard to make the film more explicitly supernatural without Eastwood walking around with a cross on his back.
Stranger
Yes, the Biblical allusions are obvious, but the Preacher can be part of a divine retribution without himself being supernatural.
If it is divine retribution, it is a moot point.
Is it High Plains Drifter or Pale Rider the has him ride off into the distance and vanish just before he should get out of sight?
Again, the scars sported by the Preacher (six or seven through the back, over the heart and lungs) would have been fatal, reinforced by Stockton’s surprise at the Preacher being alive alone argue that the main character is returned from the beyond. Along with the title and the Preacher’s mysterious ability to appear and disappear confirm that he is not just another man. This isn’t some radical interpretation, and I believe that Eastwood has specifically indicated that he intended for the film to have a supernatural theme.
In Pale Rider he rides off, crosscut with Penny calling out to him (a clear homage to the end of Shane; in one cut, he’s riding his horse uphill, and then in the next the frame is empty. In High Plains Drifter, as the Stranger rides out of what remains of the town past the cemetery, Mordecai (carving a tombstone for the betrayed Marshall Duncan) says, “I never did know your name,” to which the Stranger replies, “Oh yes, you do.” (Implying that the Stranger is the ghost of Duncan.)
Stranger
When you swim near the sand and an eel bites your hand that’s a moray. When our habits are strange and our customs deranged, that’s our mores.
[hushed whispers] Randolph Scott? [/hushed whispers]
[heavenly chorus] RANDOLPH SCOOOOOOOOTT!!! [/heavenly chorus]
But you’ll never see Clint Eastwood looking at Cary Grant like this.
I found him sympathetic. Yes, I took seriously the talk about his past, the bad things he had done. You can see it in the faces of the whores when he’s describing things he’s done to Little Bill, and after he’s shot the place up. He had been an evil, dangerous man. But he had made a change of life, and this whole trip was different. Sure, he was out to kill a couple men, but felt there was justification (“they cut up a woman, and cut out her eyes and her breasts”), and was generally decent about it even after getting his ass kicked. The shooting is bad - gutshot, not clean kill, because he is using the rifle - Scoffield has bad vision and Ned can’t bring himself to do it. Yet he tells them to take the guy water, and that he won’t shoot them. The old, evil Munny would have shot all of them just for being there.
Similarly, Spoke points out his behavior to the woman, and his insistence on fair shares including for the Scoffield Kid.
I won’t argue he had his own past to account for, and that he might have deserved to die. I would argue the man on the floor was one of the deputies and partly responsible for what happened to Ned, so from that account was just as due to die as Little Bill. But he didn’t shoot the other men in the bar, he let them go out the back, and he didn’t shoot Beauchamp despite being annoyed by him. Certainly the evil bad man he used to be would have considered killing Beauchamp just for being there.
I don’t see that he told the whore a lie. He said he didn’t want a free one because of his wife. What he didn’t tell her was that his wife was dead, but he still felt committed to his wife and that’s why he didn’t want one. I think he was sincere in his statement, just not explicit. She assumed his wife was still alive, not that he just was committed to his vow. Yes, he was trying to be kind, but I don’t think it was because he was rejecting her for looking bad, just because he didn’t want to violate his commitment.
That was some of it, certainly. He explicitly states that he was drunk most of the time, and doesn’t remember a lot of the details because of it.
Click “2” and scroll down a little to Audio.
The moment he takes the whiskey bottle when he’s hearing about what happened to Ned you know what’s going to happen.
IMHO he couldn’t have done it sober, drinking was part of (cribbing a line from Pulp Fiction) “getting into character”.
CMC fnord!
A very important bit of this movie that no one has mentioned (that I have noticed, anyway) was Munny’s drinking (and not).
Munny, when he is sick, is offered a shot to help him feel better. Even in his exceptionally crappy condition, he pushes it away. It is only when Ned is killed that he very deliberately takes the bottle and starts drinking–IMHO he CHOOSES to bring back the psychopath that he used to be, to have the devil-may-care attitude that will allow him to avenge Ned and scare the sh*t out of everyone in the town.
You callous bastard!
More of my illusions have just been shattered!!
May I use that as a sig, Sir or Madam?
Certainly. Don’t think you need my permission at any rate.
Thanks!