Revisionist Western

Unforgiven has all the hallmarks of the Western genre: horses, guns, frontier towns, gun fights, cowboys, lawlessness, and plenty of whiskey. Even its plot contains familiar Western motifs: a lone gunman entering a town (Will Munny at the end), men killing other men in defense of a woman's honor (Ned, Will, and the Kid), brothels (Greely's), evil cowboys (Quick Mike and Davey).

Unforgiven is sometimes called a Revisionist Western, a term often used to describe Western films that reflect on the genre itself and pose more complicated problems. So, while in typical Westerns the bad guys are Bad and the good guys are Good, in Unforgiven we get…Will Munny.

And Will Munny is by no means a "good guy." We understand why he has to kill Little Bill, but we're never asked to identify with him. He's a morally compromised loner, and something of a sociopath.

The film, in fact, goes out of its way to "unmask" other characters as well. W.W. Beauchamp, a writer in the business of spreading exaggerated stories about famous gunmen (English Bob chief among them), learns from Little Bill that English Bob is anything but an honorable defender of female honor. He's a violent drunk, and a reprehensible human being. Such an unmasking would never happen in a standard, generically orthodox Western.

Similarly, while Will, Ned, and the Kid make a show of going to Wyoming to defend a woman's honor, it becomes clear that they're just in it for the money. In a typical Western, defending a woman's honor is often the primary motivation, not just an added bonus.

Want more info on how Unforgiven warps the standard Western tropes? Head on over to our Symbols section. Nothing about this movie is paint-by-the-numbers Western…not even the weather in Big Whiskey.