Unforgiven

JUST what kind of a western is Clint Eastwood's highly touted Unforgiven? Revisionist? Postmodern? Deconstructionist? Or merely adult? Mostly, I would say, confused. It is one of those well-meaning liberal attempts to do right by all current politically correct notions, and the penalty it pays is self-contradiction, muddledness, moral fog. These are not mortal flaws or sins--a fuzzy enthusiast will remain gleefully unaware of them--but they make for a movie that wobbles, lurches, and variously trips itself up.

The so-called adult western has been around for some time. In Henry King's The Gunfighter (1950), the protagonist was a gunslinger trying to put his past behind him, but in vain. Essentialism wins out over existentialism in Shane (1953) as well, where neither the love of a woman nor a youngster's idolatry can keep the reformed gunfighter from riding off into his lonely sunset, after duly risking his life for the homesteaders. Still, he at least rides away; the hero of the earlier film is gunned down from behind by a glory-seeking young punk. In David Shipley's words, "a rotten tradition will have been passed on."

Alternatively, the adult western's protagonist may be someone like the marshal in High Noon (1952), virtually the only brave and honest person in town; he must take on the vengeful outlaws nearly alone, the solid citizens having cravenly forsaken him. In any case, as aging gunfighter or beleaguered upholder of the law, the hero is a pariah: a loner unsuited to a world too naive or too corrupt. And there you have pretty much the entire repertoire of the adult western, those pictures from the early Firties encapsulating most of what followed. Pauline Kael may sneer at them--"the message is that the myths we never believed in anyway were false"--but that isn't the whole story. The pariah-hero is a hero yet; those surrounding him are piddlers, poltroons, or worse.

The ambivalence in the adult western is what makes it potentially absorbing. That is what Sergio Leone, the father of spaghetti westerns, tapped into when he engaged an American television cowboy, Clint Eastwood of Rawhide, to portray the Man with No Name in A Fistful of Dollars (1964), and the rest is movie history. And now, 36 starring roles and ten westerns later--some of them directed by himself--Eastwood is back as director and star, playing William Munny, a former outlaw who robbed trains, shot up towns, and killed women and children. Then he married a good woman from New England who made a new man of him. But she died (of illness, not Munny), and here he is trying to run a pig farm to eke out a grim living--the hogs become diseased-for himself and his two young children.

A cocky pipsqueak, who calls himself the Schofield Kid and claims to have killed five men, rides up and asks Munny to team up with him to collect a thousand-dollar reward for the killing of two men guilty of brutally slashing the face of a young prostitute, Delilah, in the saloon-curebrothel of Big Whiskey, a small town run despotically by Sheriff Little Bill Daggett, a reformed but sadistic ex-gunman. Over the protests of Strawberry Alice, the madam (Frances Fisher, and good), Daggett lets the culprits go; they must, however, provide several horses for Skinny, the weasely saloon owner, by way of restitution for Delilah's permanent impairment. Skinny is content, but Alice contemptuously rejects a very fine colt, offered to Delilah by the younger and less guilty of the men (he was an unwilling accessory). The men are chased away by the prosti: tutes, who pelt them with mud.

Already the politically correct features are manifest. The women, although whores, are basically moral: they have pride, spunk, and solidarity, and offer up their collective savings in their passion for justice. The minimally guilty and repentant younger guy must perish too; if a woman has been injured, it's a die for an eye. What was Delilah's offense? Ingenuous and inexperienced, she couldn't suppress a giggle at the smallness of her client's member. The slasher acted out of hurt male-chauvinist pride: sexism and suprematism out of male inferiority feelings, Freud enlisted in the feminist cause.

More PC: the police are brutal (memories of Dirty Harry!), and all authority corrupts. Daggett is an autocratic brute who compels everyone staying in Big Whiskey to deposit his firearms with him. Noncompliers will be savagely beaten by him, even jailed; this is the fate that befalls the dapper British bounty hunter English Bob (Richard Harris at his arrogant best). But he has it coming to him: his job had been to shoot Chinese laborers who displeased the railroad barons. Killing workers of color is, of course, the most heinous crime. Yet isn't it the liberals, not Daggett, who are supposed to abrogate the right to bear arms? Haven't Eastwood and his scenarist, David Webb Peoples, slipped up here?

Munny, poor soul, has been farming for 11 years and he can hardly mount his horse any more, though once in the saddle, he's okay. His marksmanship with a six-shooter is all shot to hell, but with a rifle, he's still a crack shot. (Never fear: when called upon later on, his sidegun skills will be restored to him.) He spouts pious platitudes and keeps sanctimoniously extolling his dead wife's salutary influence until it begins to sound like a sendup. But his humility is clearly genuine, unless it represents some unconscious resentment on the filmmakers' part of the anachronistic feminism informing the rest of the film.