Eastwood and the Western
January 30, 2005
“Million Dollar Baby” is Clint Eastwood’s 25th film as a director, and to better acquaint myself with his craft before seeing ‘Baby’, I revisited two of his most famous films in the genre that made him the icon that he is- the western. Knowing ‘Baby’ was a straight drama, laced with splashes of humor, it may have served me better to re-watch some of Eastwood’s non-western, stuff like “A Perfect World”, “Mystic River”, “Bird”, and “The Bridges of Madison County”, but I think to get the best of Eastwood as a revisionist director, as well as a commanding, self-effacing actor, you can do no better than his two best westerns, the 1976 epic “The Outlaw Josey Wales”, and the Oscar-winning 1992 anti-western, “Unforgiven”. If Eastwood’s career in the western is to be defined in terms of iconic (Sergio Leone’s ‘Fistful of Dollars’ trilogy), and ironic (TV’s “Rawhide”), than ‘Josey Wales’ and “Unforgiven” are perfect polar opposites- a papa and a petulant, rebellious son, atoning for the sins of his father by lashing out against the hand that fed him for years.
In “The Outlaw Josey Wales” we get an Eastwood drunk on revenge, a bitter Southern farmer whose wife and child are slain by Union forces just before the end of the Civil War, who takes it upon himself, following another slaughter at the hands of the North, to play vigilante to John Vernon’s turncoat bounty hunter. In “Unforgiven”, 17 years later, we see a different kind of Eastwood, a retired gunslinger who has been reformed by the love of a kind woman, but after her death, takes to a bounty hunt to collect a reward on the heads of two cowboys who cut up a prostitute. He is William Munny, and much like Frankie Dunn of “Million Dollar Baby”, he is wracked with guilt over his previous life, and in old age, is trying to escape the demons, but even a reformed drunk and ruthless killer needs money, and the 1,000 dollar reward is too good to pass up. In “Unforgiven” it’s easy to see Munny as an older, regretful variation on the man at the end of ‘Josey Wales’, a homesteader who has seen too much killing, much at his own hands, and was right to give it up for a good woman.
The dive back into killing is where Eastwood’s morality plays strongest, and darkest, lensed in drab browns and blacks by Jack N. Green, and by the end, when the reward killing devolves into a revenge killing against Gene Hackman’s good intentioned, yet ruthless sheriff, the line between the happy Josey Wales, the blood-hungry young Will Munny, and the old, reformed Will Munny, is wholly blurred. “It’s a hell of a thing killin’ a man,” he says to his young, troubled partner in the films most famous line, “You take away all he’s got, and all he’s ever gonna have.” To see Eastwood deliver this line, beneath an ever darkening sky, is to see a man coming to grips with his role in film violence, and it’s quite clear; that murder, be it in war or revenge, has no good repercussions, on the soul, or the mind.
If “Unforgiven” is Eastwood denouncing, while subconsciously reinventing, the western, than “The Outlaw Josey Wales” was the beginning of a debunking of the western myth, with roots more in Peckinpah, than Ford or Hawks. In ‘Josey Wales’ there is more to the picture than Eastwood’s Southern vigilante and his revenge; we get a crew of motley western stereotypes brought vividly to life. Along the way Josey picks up an Indian squaw he saves from her abusive white master, an aged Indian warrior (Chief Dan George, the greatest of the old Indian actors), a mangy dog, a crew of colorful, broke saloon denizens (bartender, whore, rancher, etc.), and an Eastern grandmother and her granddaughter, whose clay homestead figures prominently into the final battle sequence. Each of these characters, some more than others, are clear western symbols, and Eastwood does well to differentiate the genuine from the satire, giving prominence to Dan George’s elderly Indian while playing the hapless Easterners for comedy and warm pathos. Also, along the way, is a famous sequence where Josey Wales confronts an angry Indian war chief, and talks some sense into him, becoming his blood brother. “I’m just giving you life, and you’re giving me life,” he says to Ten Bears, “and I’m sayin’ that men can live together without butchering one another.” This from a man who has killed and spit on at least thirty men throughout the picture, and who is in turn changing a whole history of Indian-on-film portrayals with one kindly gesture. In 17 years, Josey Wales will age into William Munny, and 12 years after that, William Munny, in a different time and place, will age even further into Frankie Dunn, and what they all have in common, in his own slightly humorous delivery, is Clint Eastwood, American Icon, changing the rules decade by decade.
by Adam Suraf