The Cinapse Team and friends celebrate Gene Hackman’s final Oscar-winning performance in Clint Eastwood’s legendary Western
Two Cents is a Cinapse original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team curates the series and contribute their “two cents” using a maximum of 200-400 words. Guest contributors and comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future picks. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion. Would you like to be a guest contributor or programmer for an upcoming Two Cents entry? Simply watch along with us and/or send your pitches or 200-400 word reviews to [email protected].
The final roster for our Gene Hackman memorial series confronted the Cinapse team with some of our most difficult selection choices. Even when allotted an expanded selection of seven titles, Hackman’s incredibly diverse and legendary filmography leaves any critic or fan spoiled for choice. One of cinema’s most enduring “tough men,” Hackman embodied the fracturing machismo of the 1970s – moving American film beyond seemingly unflappable marquee idols like Charlton Heston or Humphrey Bogart into dramatic realms of humbling vulnerability.
The Pick: Unforgiven (1992)
Unforgiven is a rare film that pushes the personas of both Hackman and its director-star Clint Eastwood into even deeper, more complex territory. Eastwood’s carefully-cultivated, cigar-chomping Man With No Name figure is a feebler, morally grey outlaw running from his past atrocities; as the diabolical sheriff of a small Wyoming settlement, Hackman pivots the devilish charm of his Lex Luthor villainy into someone who sees his greed and moral relativism as precisely why he should be a badge-toting lawman.
It’s the film that earned Hackman his fifth Oscar nomination and second win, beginning the thrilling final act of the star’s illustrious career. I’m thrilled that Unforgiven made the cut of our month’s lineup, and I’m excited to read what new insights our team and guests have when reflecting on this Western masterpiece.
Special Guest:
Nathan Flynn
When we lost Gene Hackman, we didn’t just lose a great actor—we perhaps the greatest actor. And with Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), Hackman delivered one of his most unforgettable performances: Little Bill Daggett, a sheriff with a badge, and a god complex. The role earned him his second Academy Award—and sealed his place in cinematic history as the rare actor who could play a villain without ever surrendering to caricature.
In 1993, Unforgiven rode off into Oscar history with four Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Editing, and—most righteously—Best Supporting Actor for Hackman. William Munny may grumble that “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it,” but in this case, both Eastwood and Hackman made a convincing case to the contrary.
Unforgiven is that rare film that actually lives up to the mythology that accrues around it. For a certain generation of viewers—those raised on Eastwood’s squint and swagger—it’s less a revisionist Western than a reckoning. By casting himself as the grimly reformed killer William Munny, Eastwood (more prone to introspection than most right-leaning filmmakers) managed to interrogate and reinvent his Man With No Name persona, meditating on the morality of murder and the futility of vengeance against a stark frontier backdrop. It’s a performance as much about erasure as presence—about what remains after the myth burns off. Behind the camera, Eastwood turns the Western inside out, peeling away its romanticism to expose something bleaker, more morally unstable, and profoundly elegiac.
When preparing to watch Eastwood’s latest film—the thrilling and brilliant Juror No. 2—I went back through his directorial catalog to cross off my blind spots. While many of his films are tremendous—some, like The Outlaw Josey Wales and Pale Rider, also explore vengeance and the weight of his star persona—the conversation about Eastwood’s filmography begins and ends with Unforgiven. It’s a director’s film, yes—but it’s also an actor’s swan song, a final confession disguised as genre play. Funereally paced and shadowed by death, it’s an old man’s Western in the most haunting sense, pulling the audience into its long dusk.
Gene Hackman’s Little Bill Daggett is a performance that was worthy of its Oscar then and has only deepened with time. He’s the most modern element of the film: a sheriff with a twisted sense of justice, convinced he’s building civilization even as he tears it down. He’s building a house—crooked, off-kilter, and devoid of right angles. It’s a perfect metaphor for his warped sense of order. Hackman plays him with the righteous fervor of a man who believes in his own decency, even as he brutalizes prisoners and indulges in the petty sadism of small-town authority.
But Hackman never flattens him into a stock villain. He’s smart to let Little Bill have charm—even humor. He’s not evil in the traditional sense; he’s terrifying because he’s reasonable. He believes in law and order—just so long as he gets to write both. His last words—“I don’t deserve this… to die like this. I was building a house.”—land with the thud of real tragedy. Not because he’s right, but because he genuinely believes he is.
Little Bill’s house—unfinished and crooked—is, frankly, the whole movie. He talks about it with pride, as if willing it into structural integrity, but we know better. Like his attempts to bring Big Whiskey into modernity—to disarm the drifters, outlaw the outlaws, and keep the peace without ever looking peaceful—it’s doomed by design. He’s a man who thinks rules are justice and cruelty is just clarity in disguise.What makes Unforgiven so emotionally dense is how every character—from William Munny to Little Bill—is chasing morality in a landscape designed to betray it. Every action is justified. Every justification is flawed. Unforgiven is the final chapter of a trilogy that began with Josey Wales and Pale Rider, both of which flirt with the archetype of the haunted avenger. But here, the revenge is colder, the violence heavier, and the cost unmistakably final. Eastwood’s dedication of the film to Don Siegel and Sergio Leone isn’t just respectful—it’s a signpost. The film closes the book on the gunslinger myth—not with a bang, but with a long, mournful silence. If the Oscars were generous, it’s only because Unforgiven earned every inch of its legend.
The Team:
Julian Singleton
The idea that “art never exists in a vacuum” is something I’ve grown to embrace the last few years. It’s fascinating how films and genres exist in perpetual conversation with one another–and there’s few Westerns like Unforgiven that reckon so directly and aggressively with the comforting nostalgia of the genre itself as much as it does for the stars within it.
Much like the Man with No Name, Eastwood’s William Munny used to be a violent gunslinger; nowadays, he can barely mount his grayed horse, and often ends up in the mud with his ailing livestock. Munny’s reputation still proceeds him in the far reaches of American territory, where tall tales still echo of his dispassionate brutality. Whatever truth to these stories still exists hides behind the glint in Eastwood’s menacing yet haunted gaze–and, at the last gasp of a moment, blazes out from his firearm without mercy.
But across Unforgiven’s runtime, Eastwood teases out how Munny, like many others in the film, is capable of far more than the violence required of him, whether it’s kindness towards Delilah (Anna Thomson), the victimized woman on whose behalf Munny was hired, or Munny’s gradual weaning of an ambitious gunslinger (Jaimz Woolvett) away from the path of death and destruction Munny once walked. As such, Eastwood and writer David Webb Peoples reorient the Western away from bursts of morally-justified courage or cunning to the idea that all these acts of violence are just that: good, bad, and ugly actions predicated on singular, deliberate choices that must be lived with for the rest of one’s lives.
We can insulate ourselves from this sense of personal cause and effect with the tales other people tell about us–case in point with how Saul Rubinek’s biographer W.W. Beauchamp becomes a coveted asset among the outlaws and lawmen alike in Big Whiskey. The promise of his editorialized tall tales offers not just fame, but moral legitimacy–itself a seeming welcome to moral absolution.
Hackman’s Sheriff Little Bill Daggett delights in creating a section of the West he can control–no guns, no violence, at least none he can’t inflict personally. Part of that control is controlling the narrative: he’s quick to disillusion everyone in Big Whiskey against English Bob’s (Richard Harris) potential heroism, undercutting his own tall tales with the truth. But like English Bob, Little Bill is quick to use Beauchamp to mythologize his own exploits–and this time, no one can testify against him.
Little Bill offers himself no such introspection, having bought fully into his hollow persona of a heroic lawman who’s tamed the West. Much like Little Bill’s cabin, Big Whiskey isn’t some idyllic bastion of civilization, but slipshod buildings founded on corruption and petty vendettas. The creakiest empire in the West. A perfect foil for Eastwood’s raw, self-deprecating performance, Hackman’s Little Bill is of a villain completely brainwashed to the idea that he’s the true hero of this story. In Little Bill’s sense, justice has been served for Delilah on the heads of some mangy traded ponies, and anything else is an affront to his moral superiority. To him, all this violence and corruption are messy yet noble means to a peaceful end, no matter who has to suffer along the way. It belongs at the top of Hackman’s portrayals of flawed lawmen alongside Popeye Doyle, Harry Caul, or Harry Moseby–an ancestor to these men whose senses of justice or morality have warped beyond comfortable use.
One of Unforgiven’s strongest aspects isn’t just the perfect subversion or evolution of Eastwood and Hackman’s established on-screen personas–it’s how both of their characters remain as morally ambiguous as they begin. Little Bill dies still thinking he’s the hero (now a martyr), while Munny fulfills the job he came to do with as much violence as he’s tried to avoid. While he flees the West for San Francisco with his children, Munny still remains an inscrutable specter of violence for those he’s affected. Unlike still valid jewels of the Western genre like Stagecoach, High Noon, and the like, Unforgiven never allows its moral grays to split into tidier delineations. It’s a film about haunted minds, flawed justice, and the tales we tell ourselves for comfort in a cruel and vengeful world.
Spencer Brickey
Clint is one of the true great American filmmakers. I specify “American”, as he continuously probed and exposed America throughout his work, getting to a deeper truth that exists below the star spangled surface. From his directorial debut, High Plains Drifter, which takes the archetype of “loner cowboy” he popularized with Sergio Leone, and turns him into a full blown bastard (a theme he masters in Unforgiven), Eastwood has continued to hold up a light to the true American spirit, which can be mean and violent, and with a twisted sense of morality.
The absolute pinnacle of this examination is Unforgiven. Eastwood shakes off the shackles of all the Western genre trappings, creating a world of greys, where villains and heroes mix in a violent center. Eastwood plays Bill Munny, a reformed thief, murderer and all around scoundrel, who is enlisted to help murder two cowboys for what they did to a prostitute. Standing in his way is Little Bill Daggett, in one of Gene Hackman’s greatest roles, who looks to keep all violent elements out of the small town of Big Whiskey.
There are no heroes in Unforgiven. Nobody saves the day, or right wrongs that have occurred. What happens is violent men create violent situations that end in violent demise. Bill Munny kills reluctantly, then, filled with whiskey and rage, kills for revenge. Little Bill kills out of a sense of duty, but still revels in absolute power and cruelty. The “Schofield Kid” (Jaimz Woolvett) kills to feel important. Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) finds that he can kill no more, but still finds himself flung into the cruelty of the world he inhabits.
Filled with amazing performances, the real grounding characters are Eastwood’s Munny and Hackman’s Little Bill. Eastwood plays Munny as a man who regrets his past, but doesn’t feel shame, only an understanding of who he once was, and who quietly knows he’ll always be. Watching him go from remorseful to hateful in that final act is some of the best work Eastwood ever put in as an actor, never allowing Munny’s turn to feel heroic, but truly destructive.
Hackman’s role of Little Bill is, in my opinion, his greatest put to screen. Little Bill is a lawman, the only thing keeping his small town from descending into violence and chaos. He’s a man who has seen the depths of depravity and violence, and has been sharpened by it, a cutting blade of justice. But, he is still a man, susceptible to hubris and ego. Little Bill is a bastard, no different than Munny or English Bob; the only difference is that he believes himself righteous in his violence.
Unforgiven is about the destruction of myth; the myth of western romanticism, the myth of the rule of law, the myth of being able to change as a person. It is, when viewed from this perspective, an incredibly harrowing and depressing film, and is an out and out masterpiece from one of the best filmmakers this nation has produced.
Ed Travis
William Munny: “It’s a hell of a thing, killin’ a man. You take away all he’s got, and all he’s ever gonna have.”
Kid: “Yeah, well I guess they had it comin’.”
William Munny: “We all got it comin’, Kid.”
Back in the 1990s AFI put out a [paper] list of the top 100 American movies ever made. Few contemporary titles were on that list, but Unforgiven was one of them. I was likely far too young for the film, but I had the retail VHS and wore that shit out. I didn’t understand anything about “revisionist Westerns” and less about Clint Eastwood’s earlier Western oeuvre. What I did know was that Unforgiven unequivocally kicked ass, and went hard. And like many a modern masterpiece, it reveals more to you the more you watch it, the more you grow, the more life and America beat you down.
Unforgiven really doesn’t have any heroes. None of what happens is “good” for anyone involved. Some characters learn some things, some grow, some make it out alive. But many of the characters won’t live to see the end of Unforgiven, and for damn sure, little justice is found.
I guess that’s what makes a revisionist Western. An acknowledgment that it wasn’t all “high ho, Silver” and six shooter justice. An acknowledgment that fact and fiction blended generously together in the old west, and in our many depictions of it. This is textually explored in terms of who the real “killers” are, and what’s all just reputation or showboating. Gene Hackman’s Sheriff “Little Bill” Daggett is clearly the villain of the piece, but he’s an honest villain. He’s a stone cold killer and a son of a bitch who nonetheless has the law on his side and rules with an iron fist. Then there are our trio of protagonists, seeking payment from a group of prostitutes who are offering a reward for the heads of the men who brutally assaulted and scarred one of their own (and whom Little Bill refuses to punish). Jaimz Woolvett’s “Schofield Kid”, Morgan Freeman’s Ned, and Eastwood’s Munny set out to collect, Little Bill stands in their way, and no one is really coming out on top. The kid spends the whole movie fronting as a killer, while William and Ned spend the whole film reassuring themselves that their wild, stone cold killer days are behind them, and that they’re changed men. In the end, The Kid learns he’ll never kill again, Ned and William learn they’re not so reformed after all, and Little Bill never gets to finish that house he was building.
What is justice? What’s the value of a human life? Are we born killers or are killers made? Why is America so fundamentally broken and prone to fronting and bloviation? Unforgiven isn’t a masterpiece because it answers those questions. It’s a masterpiece because it fearlessly asks them, calls us on our bullshit, and absolutely rips while doing it. We all got it comin’, Kid.
Justin Harlan
Let me be clear, Westerns are not a genre I generally enjoy. In fact, other than watching them to help me fall asleep (I kid… mostly), I can count on one hand the number I them that I truly enjoy. So, this film had a ton of work to do in order to even begin to be something I was going to care much for. So, it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that it’s not my favorite Hackman movie.
Yet, having only watched this once before… and in its early days on VHS while I was in middle school… I was excited to dive back into it and see what all the fuss was about. To my surprise, I was pretty into it. And, despite a genuinely stacked cast, most of that enjoyment was the man himself – Gene “Little Bill” Hackman. He was always fantastic, commanding every scene he was in. Which, of course, was the most unsurprising part of this experience.
Thus, I can’t say I expect to hop back on a rewatch of this anytime soon, but I’m certainly happy that this assignment pushed me towards doing exactly that. In fact, the literature nerd in me needs to dive into some of the obvious references to classic literature, as well. There’s a ton in the story that brings to mind Homer, as well as a variety of other classical elements. So, even without Gene, there was definitely a hook there for me. So… well… maybe I actually liked this one more than I realize… so forget what I said, I probably will rewatch this sooner than I thought.
Goodbye to a Great: TWO CENTS Celebrates Gene Hackman
To mark the passing of a cinematic legend, we at Cinapse are putting together a titanic selection of some of the late Gene Hackman’s biggest and best performances. From sports dramas to military thrillers to bona fide classics, here’s a list of what we’re watching:
April 28 – Crimson Tide – (Digital Rental / Purchase – 1 hour 56 minutes)
May 5 – The Conversation – (Prime Video – 1 hour 53 minutes)
May 12 – Enemy of the State – (Prime Video – 2 hours 12 minutes)
May 19 – The Royal Tenenbaums – (Digital Rental / Purchase – 1 hour 50 minutes)
