Unforgiven/Awesome

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • It's this film - or The Outlaw Josey Wales - that's considered to be Clint Eastwood's Magnum Opus.
  • Little Bill, lecturing to Beauchamp about how hard it is mentally to carry a gun, promptly pulls a gun out of a drawer and offers the writer to use it and help English Bob escape the jail. Beauchamp can't tell if the gun's loaded or not. It is. Demonstrates both Little Bill's hard-learned skill in reading other people - knowing Beauchamp wouldn't shoot - and his sadism by encouraging English Bob to get the gun from Beauchamp. It's when Bob sees Bill's grin turn into a sneer - and ready to pull his own gun to "shoot in self-defense" - that English Bob refuses the gun.
    • And English Bob knows it's loaded. It's why he screams at Beauchamp to shoot, figuring that it would surprise the hell out of Little Bill.
  • The scene between Munny and The Schofield Kid at the tree, waiting for their payment, drinking the whiskey as The Kid tries to come to terms with something Munny already knows...

The Kid: It don't seem real... how he ain't gonna never breathe again, ever... how he's dead. And the other one too. All on account of pulling a trigger.
Munny: It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. Take away all he's got... and all he's ever gonna have.
The Kid: Yeah, well, I guess they had it coming.
Munny (solemn): We all got it coming, kid.

  • When Clint Eastwood's William Munny hears what happened to his friend Ned (and starts taking BIG swigs from an all-too-convenient whiskey bottle), right through the climactic shootout in the bar is pure, uncut Awesome. Then he actually tops this a few minutes later when he rides out of town and growls out, "You better bury Ned right! Better not cut up, nor otherwise harm no whores... or I'll come back and kill every one of you sons of bitches!" while an American flag waves and drops to the ground behind him. One of the top ten CMOA ever.
    • "'Deserves got nothin' to do with it."