Big Whiskey is not the ideal location for your dream vacation for a number of reasons. The sheriff is a raging psychopath, 100% of the women in town seem to be locked in sexual slavery, and they use dead men as a bar décor.

Oh—and it's also raining all. the. time.

It is raining at the beginning of the film, we hear thunder clouds in the sky during the night of English Bob's detainment (at the same time we know Will, Ned, and the Kid are close by), it's raining when Will & Co. arrive, and, of course, it is raining during Will's final confrontation with Little Bill.

So what's with all the rain? First of all, the rumbling of the thunderheads foreshadows violence.

But more interestingly, Unforgiven's weather stands in stark contrast to the weather in most Western films. You watch a Western expecting to see dust devils, tumbleweeds, and the glare of the noonday sun. You expect parched landscapes and cactuses. Or maybe—maybe—you expect some powdery snow.

You don't expect the Wild Frontier to have the same soggy climate as Seattle or London.

There are a couple of good reasons why Westerns generally pick the arid look. The most important, of course, is that a lot of the American West is…super arid. Between the prairies of the Midwest and the Sierra Nevada/Cascade range, the weather tends to be bone-dry.

But this normal Western movie weather pattern is also in place to underscore the hostile environment. A landscape without rain is an infertile, forbidding place. It's as harsh as the men that inhabit it, no crops = no domesticity, etc.

By shooting pretty crucial scenes in the rain, Unforgiven upends this Western trope. The climate doesn't make the Western, you can almost hear Clint Eastwood say. Instead, the heartless murderers who populated the Wild West make the Western.