According to the rumors, he went west to San Francisco, where he prospered in dry goods.
Thank you all for the responses. (Very informative and varied perceptions…)
I kind of agree with this statement…
That’s one of the things that has always really annoyed me about old movies – the unrealistic, bloodless, even *sanitized *look of even the most violent events. It’s distracting and a cheat (even though I’m sure it was due to a combination of the repressive and censorious morals and the comparatively crude SFX of the era ); film violence should be portrayed as realistically and graphically as possible unless there’s a real good aesthetic reason to not do so. I like the modern, more realistfic approach a whole lot better – people *bleed *when they’re shot or stabbed or fall off cliffs, and the filmmakers of the earlier eras were being dishonest in their depictions of clean knife-in-back stabbings, “sound guns” (they must kill their targets with sound waves, not bullets, because there aren’t any bullet holes!) and beatdowns that didn’t do more than mess up the recipient’s hair.
It’s about a man who really is not a good person. He was did extremely bad things when he was younger, found a woman he loved and loved her…tried to make a life for himself, lost hs wife and still tried hard. An offer of money was laid out to him so that he could escape from his life and he took it…justifying it as best he could but took it and so he started his slip back.
Through out the movie he still fought it, but it slowly came up and grabbed ahold of him, finally jerking him back to his old ways when he lost his friend.
It was tragic, really, because Ed Money (that was his name, right?) lost everything he had fought for for many years. All gone. Ed Money was almost right back where he was at the end of the show…a violent, boozed out psychopath. You just knew as he rode off that it would be complete. A waste. The loss of a good fight. Also, if you are religious…the loss of his battle for his soul.
The movie, while violent, is full of anti-violent themes. The senseless of it (like the story of 2-gun Tommy), the waste of it (a man may have done a bad thing…and should have been punished but wasn’t and so was killed - but he wasn’t ALL bad, there was some hope but now that is gone now).
The way it entraps you and pulls you back in so you can’t escape (The sheriff wanting to sit on his porch for his new house) He tried to solve this ‘irritation’ (the whores money) with violence…and it got him killed. Wasn’t there another way?
Vengence not helping a damn thing.
The movie was full of anti-violence themes. Very Un-western genre where the ending gunfights fixes all problems.
Excellent film…and no way someone could walk away from it with any thinking that violence solves problems.
It was a good movie. One of the few times I paid full fare to see a movie twice. However, if you remake a movie three times one of them is bound to be good, High Plains Drifter, Pale Ride, Unforgiven.
That whole scene of William Munny coming into town in the rain, seeing his friend Will dead in his coffin, and then shooting up the barful of posse guys is one of the best scenes in moviedom.
When the group of guys is drinking it up and celebrating, not knowing that Munny has silently entered the saloon and is observing them, I always want to scream out to warn them, even though they’re a bunch of jerkwads. Then Munny’s gleaming shotgun is slowly raised up into the frame of the picture, and it gives me cold shivers every time.
Little Bill: “I don’t deserve this. I was building a house!”
Munny: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”
ETA: my next favorite line.
Guy in the bar: “You just shot an unarmed man!”
Munny: “Well, he shoulda armed himself, then, if he’s gonna decorate his saloon with my dead friend.”
That same exact line was an opening quote on The Wire. Spoken by Snoop on the penultimate episode of the series.
Anyone know if it originated with Unforgiven?
The final scene in this movie, and the Russian roulette scene in The Deer Hunter are my two favorite movie scenes of all time.
This thread is making me want to see the movie again.
It was the shot of Wil Munny standing there that really did it for me. When the audience sees the look on his face and you hear their reaction as they all realize that someone is going to die. I don’t remember any actor ever portraying deadly menace so well as Eastwood does in that one shot.
*Unforgiven is a great film. I think it kind of began Eastwood’s ongoing examination of his own role as an icon of violence in the American mythos: from his Leone films to his Dirty Harry movies, he’s been iconically linked to the vigilante, might-makes-right tradition of macho adventure films. Beginning with Unforgiven, and in every film he’s made since then–especially and beautifully in his recent, what, diptych?, of Flags of Our Fathers *and Letters from Iwo Jima, he seems to be very closely examining the power that images of violence have in our culture and, by extension, his role in creating those images.