Clint Eastwood (88 page)

Clint was stoic in this adversity and is stoic in recalling it: “Sometimes these things work; sometimes they don’t. It’s just hard to come up with good material all the time.” Some of this equanimity was based on personal history, on recollections of the several remarkable transformations that had marked and shaped this career, but he also knew something the outsiders did not, that he had in his possession a script that would return him triumphantly to his genre roots and yet speak in clear metaphors to certain pressing issues of the moment. He had held it quietly to himself not because he had any doubts about it, but because he knew that a day would come when he would need to draw on its redemptive power. Before he went off to shoot it in the fall of 1991, he made one, and only one, significant revision in David Webb Peoples’s screenplay: When he originally purchased it, the script had been called
The Cut-Whore Killings
. That had been changed to
The William Munny Killings
. Now Clint ordered another title change. Henceforth, this film would be known as
Unforgiven
.

C
lint had two metaphors to describe his feelings for
Unforgiven
. One was as a talisman: “It was something I could sit on and bank on and I kind of hung on to it like a nice little gold watch. It was a nice feeling to know that I had it back there.” The other was as a treat: “It was kind of a little plum I was savoring. It’s like you have something good on your plate, and you’re saying, ‘I’ll eat this last.’ ”

Both were apt. David Webb Peoples had written this script on spec in 1976, as he would later put it, “
sheltered by ignorance and anonymity,” not yet a professional screenwriter, not yet knowing the tricks of the trade—which is one reason his work, full of novelistic digression and dialogue that rambles, as conversation does in life, is so good. Francis Ford Coppola at one time held an option on it, but he let it drop, and in 1983, when Clint was looking for a writer to work on another project,
The Cut-Whore Killings
was shown to him as a sample of Peoples’s work, and he optioned it “in a minute.”

Sonia Chernus heatedly objected. “
We would have been far better off not to have accepted trash like this piece of inferior work,” she wrote in a memo to Clint. She hated its rough language (toned down somewhat in production), hated the basic situation, hated the way it was developed. “I can’t think of one good thing to say about it,” she concluded. “Except maybe, get rid of it FAST.” Obviously, he ignored his story editor’s opinion—concluding a deal for the script in 1985—but he remains amused by its unwonted passion. He called Peoples, who by this time had earned a shared writing credit on
Blade Runner
and whom he would not meet in person until he had finished
Unforgiven
, and said: “
I can’t do what Francis Coppola would do, but I think I can bring something to it.”

He denies saving the script for a rainy day or that his recent string of box-office failures constituted threatening weather. “I don’t think I ever really thought about it as I’ve got to get out there and make a hit to keep
up my Hooper Rating.” The delay, he insists, was entirely a matter of aesthetics; he thought “age would be a benefit” when it came to playing Will Munny. Even though the script described Will as a man of thirty-five or forty, he was a hard-used and grizzled figure, psychologically far older than those years. Neither did Clint see the film as an atonement for his own wicked on-screen ways; he has never felt the slightest need to make such a gesture. Nor did he consciously plan this to be a farewell to westerns—though, as he would frequently say during and after production, “If there’s going to be a last one this is a perfect one.”

At its simplest level, he believed the film said something useful and intelligent about the cheapness with which life was held in America, especially in its popular culture. He also guessed that it might do all right commercially—perhaps grossing in the $50 to $60 million range, as
Pale Rider
had. That being so, he didn’t think he had to cut corners as he had with some of his other heartfelt projects. He also imagined the film someday providing him the kind of retrospective satisfaction that
Josey Wales
had.

In preproduction it became clear that Clint felt the film had greater potential, but that he was disciplining himself against discussing it; he did not want to be disappointed again. But you could read these unvoiced ambitions elsewhere, for instance in a production schedule that was twice as long as
Pale Rider
’s, a film that was, if anything, slightly larger in scale. You could see them in his casting of the other major roles. In a typical Eastwood film they would have been played by good, solid, relatively anonymous character men; in
Unforgiven
they were played by Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman and Richard Harris, stars in their own right. You could discern them, too, in the physical production. Henry Bumstead’s set for Big Whiskey, the miserable little Wyoming county seat, circa 1880, where most of the action was staged, contained no false fronts. Its buildings were solidly, expensively rooted on this land; every structure was fully practical, and all of the film’s interiors were made here, not on a soundstage.

Above all you could measure Clint’s seriousness by the remoteness and discomfort of the location. He always likes to make his movies far up-country, isolating himself with his cast and crew well away from distractions, personal and professional, where they can create their own private world. But he had outdone himself this time. Sited deep within the vastness of the E.P. Ranch in Alberta, Canada, Big Whiskey was some sixty miles southwest of the nearest major city, Calgary. If you had placed a camera atop its highest point, its windmill, you could have panned it 360 degrees without revealing the slightest evidence of modern civilization,
not a house or a highway, not a power line or a railroad track.

This isolation imposed substantial hardships on the company, numbering about 150 at full strength, as it worked six-day weeks, many of them given over to night shoots that did not end until two in the morning. No one had family with them, and most crew members were quartered in High River, an unprepossessing small town, where the motels and restaurants offered minimal creature comforts. From there it was about twenty-five miles to the ranch gate, after which they were confronted with a long ride along a jolting, ungraded, single-track road hastily scraped across a high plain. It deposited you at a base camp, erected at the foot of the hill where Big Whiskey had been constructed. This was a circle of mobile homes and trailer-drawn temporary buildings, where the company tethered its horses, stored its costumes, took its meals and did its paperwork.

In his pursuit of authenticity, the director had banned motorized traffic between set and base camp (the only exception was the rarely used camera crane, which was mounted on a truck). Everyone moved up and down the hill on foot, on horseback or by hitching rides on the horse-drawn wagons that plodded between the two points when they weren’t being used to dress a sequence. There was a practical reason for this; Clint didn’t want to waste time erasing anachronistic tire tracks from the set’s main street, which was constantly watered to keep it looking authentically muddy. But there was a psychological reason for it, too: A few minutes on a bouncing buckboard is a form of time travel, quickly jolting you out of the present and into the past.

The director was serenely content out here. “That’s part of the appeal of a western,” Clint said one sparkling September day. “You get out on location, the air is fabulous, like it is right here”—he paused and sniffed appreciatively—“and if you sat out here, if you didn’t go back into town in the evenings, you’d eventually think, Yeah, this is the world for me. For a brief moment, whatever the schedule is, you’re in another era, another time.”

And, in this instance, Clint Eastwood was in a moral universe different from any that he had previously inhabited. When
Unforgiven
was released the following summer it was almost invariably tagged “a revisionist western.” But that’s not quite the right word for it. The first revisionists—Leone, Peckinpah and the rest—had slashed a wide, bloody—absurdist, if you will—swath through the genre. Their basic message, as Clint said while he was shooting, was that “life was sometimes extremely cheap—you know, you see a lot of nameless bodies falling off buildings and so forth.”

Unforgiven
cuts a narrower, deeper path through the form’s conventions.
None of its bodies are nameless. All its deaths count for something. In that sense, it might better be termed a “re-revisionist” western, carefully supplying everyone with reasonable, carefully explicated motives for their behavior, but bringing them to bloody chaos anyway. On its way to that conclusion, it casually, almost incidentally, subverts our comfortable expectation of stock western types and situations. This is a movie in which whores turn out not to be golden-hearted, but angry and vengeful; a movie in which a seemingly reasonable lawman turns out to be an ugly sadist who, unlike the reassuring peacekeeper of western lore, is not the source of his community’s stability, but of its chaos; a movie in which the celebrity gunfighter, before whose reputation all are supposed to tremble, is revealed to be an empty blowhard, and the seemingly psychotic adolescent, who aspires to similar fame, turns to mush when he actually kills someone. It is finally a movie in which the presumptive hero, lured out of retirement to right a wrong, does not find moral satisfaction in the act, but despair, rage and something very close to madness.

That figure, of course, is Clint’s Will Munny. Once a killer of terrifying mien and repute, he believes, when we meet him, that he has been reformed by the love of a good woman, though as we will learn there is more of escapism in his piety than true regeneration. His wife, moreover, has died, and the widower, trying to raise two children alone, is eking out a precarious living as a hog farmer when the young would-be gunfighter, styling himself the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett), seeks him out. He tells him that two drunken cowboys have brutally slashed a whore in Big Whiskey when she laughed at the “teensy little pecker” displayed by one of them. The other prostitutes, feeling that the sheriff, Little Bill Daggett (Hackman), has not punished them sufficiently, are offering a bounty for their execution. Will at first rejects the venture, then begins to see it as his last hope of escaping poverty. He asks Ned Logan (Freeman), his old partner in crime, now also retired, to accompany him, and meeting the kid on the trail they all make for Big Whiskey and their complicated fates.

They are about to learn (or perhaps one should say demonstrate) the several stupid reasons men drift into violence—out of simple greed (to some degree moving almost everyone in this story), out of macho posturing (the Kid), out of misapprehended reality (Munny, since rumor has vastly exaggerated the wrong done the prostitute, providing a convenient rationale for his venality), out of misplaced loyalty (Ned, who is the most innocent, therefore the most tragic, figure in the story), out of oversimplified morality reinforced by psychopathy (Daggett), out of egotism and moral laziness (Harris’s English Bob, the professional killer).

These last two figures require further comment. The sheriff is a clever and even attractive lunatic, using his rigid attitude toward law enforcement to justify, and a genial and folksy manner to disguise, a deeply sadistic spirit. It would be easy to see him as a small-town hypocrite, familiar for decades in popular fiction. But his soul is more deeply riven than that, so that it is finally impossible to say whether he is a fundamentally evil man with a useful capacity for good or, alternatively, a good man with a perversion that must will out. Whichever he is, he is also a premature gun-control advocate. Signs at the edge of town order visitors to surrender their firearms to him; what they do not say is that if strangers fail to comply, he will cheerfully beat them senseless. This is what he does to English Bob, who is a sort of deadly con artist, lording it over the provincials with his foreign accent and grandiloquent ways, but in reality a self-deluded coward.

“I like it that the good guys aren’t all good and the bad guys aren’t all bad,” Clint said one morning on location, getting to the heart of the matter. “Everyone has their flaws and everyone has their rationale and a justification for what they do,” he added, unconsciously echoing the unforgettable tag line—“In this world, everyone has his reasons”—from Jean Renoir’s great comedy of mixed motives,
The Rules of the Game
.

The brutal encounter between Little Bill and English Bob (which takes place on July Fourth, tying violence and American nationhood together) establishes the film’s dialectic. A confident moralist and a confident immoralist, they represent, respectively, the attitudes between which the more ambiguous bounty hunters, everyone else in this movie, will be caught and tortured. If only they could be so certain.…

The most significant of these others is Bob’s one-man entourage, his “biographer,” W. W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek). He represents all those westering hacks whose nineteenth-century dime novels and penny dreadfuls would become the source of most of the western movies’ classic tropes. The symbol of everyone’s desire to convert the mean realities of the frontier experience into inspiring national myth, he is, quite literally, a man who will print the legend instead of the truth. He will also abandon English Bob for Little Bill when he bests Bob, and at the end, when Will Munny defeats Daggett, he will try to attach himself to the man who has proved to have, in the writer’s eyes, the largest star quality, for, yes,
Unforgiven
is also a meditation on celebrity.

Will’s dubious triumph will be hard and desperately earned. The idyllic world he and his companions ride through on their way to Big Whiskey—verdant fields and forests, sparkling streams—disappears when they arrive. A storm is brawling across the hilltop, and we will not see it in a fresh morning light again, for there is no virtue in this village;
pace
John Wayne, it is as corrupt as Lago in
High Plains Drifter
. Moreover, Will arrives there shaking with ague. While his friends visit the whores on the second floor of Greely’s saloon he settles down to nurse a drink and himself. There Daggett, showing off for Beauchamp—he grows more brutal and self-regarding under the writer’s avid attention—identifies Will as the kind of saddle tramp he will have none of in his town, correctly accuses him of failing to abide by the firearms ordinance and beats him unmercifully. Will is obliged to crawl for the door, and the next we see of him is his being nursed back from near death by Ned.