Old Man Clint Eastwood

Second Thoughts on Two Films

I think I first heard the name Clint Eastwood when Marty McFly decided to use it as his cowboy pseudonym in Back-to-the-Future III. Even without knowing who he was, I at least knew he must be a famous cowboy. Eastwood made his name in the 1960s as a gunslinger in Westerns, starting in television before moving to the big screen and continued making films in the genre through the seventies and eighties. That being so, my first encounter with Eastwood as a cowboy came through his final Western film, which he also directed, 1992’s Unforgiven.

Unforgiven won the Oscar for Best Film, and Eastwood also received the award for Best Director. In many respects, it is a fine film with excellent casting and performances from well-known stars like Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman. At a surface level, the story seems straightforward and familiar to the genre. Some simple town folk suffer injustice at the hands of bad men, and due to corruption in the local law enforcement, they call on Eastwood’s character, William Munny, to use his gunslinging skills to resolve the situation. However, this summation of the story belies what is actually happening with the complexities at play within the film.

Unforgiven is not a traditional Western. The simple binary of good and bad guys is absent; some may find it slow or lacking action. Make no mistake, Munny, the protagonist, is primarily a moral character: a single dad who has given up drinking to be a hard-working farmer struggling to provide for his kids. Eastwood’s character is haunted by a violent past, which catches up with him, initially opening an opportunity to make some money to support his family. Apart from Eastwood’s character and his friend, played by Freeman, who are both reluctantly called out of farm life for an outside-the-law justice hitman job, the remainder of the cast are primarily “bad guys” of different kinds. Complicated characters, like those in this film, bring a significant sense of realism to the story, which appeals to my aesthetic sensibilities. For example, I could not help but feel something for the movie’s “big-bad”, Hackman’s character, who is shown building his own timber house, which he never got to enjoy.

From start to finish, a strong anti-violence theme runs right through Unforgiven. As it turns out, it’s much harder to be a gun for hire than it sounds. One of the three hitmen couldn’t go ahead with it in the end; another, who had spent the whole movie talking up his outlaw credentials, freaks out, vowing never to touch a gun again after his first kill. Even Eastwood’s character demands that a man he has just shot be given a drink of water as he’s dying. A subplot involving a writer who catalogues the exploits of would-be honourable gunslingers drives the point home, as his grand tales are exposed as a fraud. The thoroughgoing critique of violence reminds me of the book of Judges from the Bible, where the heroes are flawed, killing results in more killing, and an unspeakable act against a woman escalates to a final bloodbath. In a way, the movie takes a similar trajectory as it comes to the final scene.

Things take a turn when Freeman’s character is killed, which leads to Eastwood’s character, Munny, returning to the bottle and storming into the saloon, killing a room full of people. It was almost as though a chaos monster had been unleashed. Hackman’s character is surprised and appalled that Munny would shoot an unarmed man and that he’d killed women and children in his past. Apparently, there was supposed to be some kind of honour code in this town, despite the events of the movie indicating otherwise. The film’s realism disappears momentarily as Munny shoots a room full of people, all of whom are completely unsuccessful at firing back at him. It’s a conflicting scene for the viewer; this is the most entertaining scene of the film, and like the women who hired Munny, you’ve now got what you paid for, and you're glad to see some kind of justice for the victims. At the same time, if you’ve allowed yourself to enter the story, you can’t help but feel uneasy. Eastwood’s character has become a terrifying menace, threatening to come back and kill everyone, not just you, but your wife and all of your friends. It may be that these are hollow threats that are being made to ensure a safe exit, but are they really? Some might be inclined to consider this a redemptive kind of violence and that the town was left with a newfound peace. Chaos monsters don’t generally bring peace, and recent history indicates that using guns to take out the bad guys and then clearing out of town can end up making things worse.

That final scene was where the film ended, except for a change in music and final title card. Although somewhat ambiguous, the final notes indicated that William Munny went back to his kids, moved them to San Francisco and got into the dry goods business. It would have made for a simpler story if he didn’t have kids and if we didn’t know what happened to him. In re-watching the film, something about this ending left me feeling cold. Stories don’t have to play by the rules or go the way I would want them to. If I am honest, though, I have to say this ending is hard to get my head around. It’s very difficult to believe that he just returned to his kids and got on with his life. How could this be a fitting end to the story that had worked so hard to be realistic about the consequences of violent bloodshed on real people? I wonder if some part of Eastwood struggled with this seemingly unfinished dimension to the story.

Eastwood may have made his name in Western films during the 1960s, but he cemented his ongoing place as a star on the silver screen in the Dirty Harry films through the seventies and eighties. In all the films, “Dirty” Harry Callahan is a cop who goes after violent criminals, enforcing his vision of justice, usually killing them, with some highly memorable one-liners along the way. If Unforgiven was the older and wiser Eastwood’s response to the Westerns of his past, you could say that his 2008 film Gran Torino was a similar response to the Dirty Harry movies.

Much could be said about Gran Torino, but what I find particularly interesting is the inverted story arc that Eastwood’s character in the film, Walt Kowalski, has compared to William Munny from Unforgiven. Although Kowalski and Munny are recently widowed, older, tough guys, their journeys take polar opposite directions. Munny starts out as a character who has already been reformed, with a drastic conversation brought about by his relationship with his deceased wife, but from there, out of care and concern for his children and friends, he goes ahead with actions that go against the grain of his own redemption. On the contrary, Kowalski starts out the film as a sour soul whose children don’t need him, and as he learns he’s dying, he becomes more adventurous in pulling out his guns. Kolwalski’s redemption story comes about through his engagement with the strangers who live next door, but in trying to help them, the bad guys return with more guns.

As the violence escalates and a young woman is again subjected to unspeakable acts, Eastwood’s character has a serious conversation with his now friend and the woman’s brother about the reality of what killing does to your soul. To save his young friend from the final showdown, Kowalski locks him in the basement before going to confront the thugs. This confrontation ends up being a complete inversion of what happened at the same point in Unforgiven. Rather than getting drunk and barging in on the gang, Kowalski soberly calls them to come out of their house; instead of shooting all the gang members, he gets them all to shoot him. He does this carefully, ensuring he has witnesses, and as it’s not the old west, law enforcement does come to arrest the criminals. What prompted the gang members to open fire was Walt reaching for what they thought was a gun, but it ended up being a cigarette lighter. As he reached into his coat, he whispered the words: “Hail Mary, full of grace…”. Then, after receiving countless bullet wounds, he falls to the ground with his arms stretched wide, in the shape of a cross, with bloodied hands appearing as though his palm had been pierced.

For some, this kind of overt Christian imagery may be a little on the nose. Within the context of this film, it had not come from nowhere. Walt’s wife had been a devout Catholic, and a young priest had a recurring presence in the film, including attending to Kowalski in confession just prior to this incident, where he told Walt to pray ten Hail Marys. Cycles of violence don’t often end without sacrifice and without a cost. Stories of redemption and self-sacrifice are powerful, and although they can be ugly, they can also paradoxically be beautiful at the same time. The paths to peace and justice are not divergent. This story had the police come in quickly to help with the justice part; in the real world, patience is often required. Whilst I grew up immersed in a culture that celebrated stories of the hero who saved the day with a gun in hand, I am convinced there is a better story. Old man Clint Eastwood found that story, and as it turns out, it’s an ancient story that stands at the hinge of history. I’m convinced that there is a better vision of what it means to be a hero and likewise, what it means to be a man.