Without reservation and in the spirit of all things appealing to the universal spirit of creative brilliance within human aspiration and achievement, Unforgiven is one of the greatest American films ever produced. Lacking superlatives adequate to the task of giving the film a winning description I'm left with cliché-ridden platitudes long used up on inferior work. Even so it's clear that Clint Eastwood's culminating western is completely convincing as a work of cinema, as a piece of art and as a meditation on myth-making by one who has lived through times both bad and good.

Starring as a retired gunfighter turned pig farmer and single father named Will Munny, Eastwood brings his characteristic squint and steely-eyed glare to a role of considerable complexity. Now off the booze and sober to the responsibility of raising two children in relative poverty, Will is haunted both by the ghost of his dead wife and the men he killed in his youth as a reckless gunfighter. He's also unconvinced of his once supreme homicidal instincts that seem to him as much a part of his inexplicably still living legend as to the remaining connections he has with youthfulness and innocence.

Into his life steps the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) who's chasing the bounty offered by a group of whores seeking retribution for the slashing of one of their own. Looking at the Kid with scorn reserved for one's memory of self, Will reluctantly agrees to seek the bounty and pair of cowboys responsible for inflicting knife wounds on a working girl. Unfortunately the Kid is near-sighted, Will can barely shoot a gun or ride a horse anymore and though his old partner Ned (Morgan Freeman) remains loyal to a fault, there's a sense of foreboding in what the three men set out to do.

Indeed the heart of their trouble lies in Sheriff Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman) who protects his town and its pair of woman-slashing cowboys from the odd killer seeking a whore's bounty. Himself no shrinking violet Bill proves ruggedly fierce and oddly sensitive about the idea of building his home by hand. Still, it's his crusade against the whorehouse and its lead prostitute Strawberry Alice (Frances Fisher) that puts Will's quest for redemption in check against the authority of a professional lawman.

As Will, Ned and the Kid ride cross country, rediscovering their kinship with the saddle and their joy of manly pursuits, another crack shot enters Little Bill's protectorate in the form of English Bob (Richard Harris). Seeing that the two have an unpleasant shared history, Bob's traveling companion, a scandal rag journalist named Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), is treated to Little Bill's version of past events. Quickly Bob is beaten to a pulp with Beauchamp's allegiance switching to the sheriff in whom the many legends of the west seem both epitomized and stereotyped in a moment.

When Will's trio sets upon killing one of the cowboys who slashed Alice's companion, all competing forces collide. Little Bill tortures and kills Ned and beats Will to the point of nearly killing him. The Kid confronts the second cowboy who he shoots and kills only to discover he's a poor fit for the profession. Not Will, however, whose journey from farmer-father into full fledged killing machine is made complete as he rides into town to avenge his beating and Ned's horrible death.

Ending in a shoot-out of legendary proportions with Beauchamp present to spin the tale into the stuff of fact, Will maintains his legacy and kills Little Bill without being wounded despite a roomful of armed men he dispatches single-handedly. In so doing he earns his bounty, returns home to collect his children and then, as we are told in the movie's final scrawl, he was rumored to have become a successful merchant without the encumbrance of his legend or the ghosts that originally haunted him.

Dedicated to Eastwood's professional mentors Don Siegel and Sergio Leone, master directors of their own reputation, Unforgiven demythologizes the western genre and then sets it on a new path consistent with changing times. It demonstrates the fact of aging heroes and the higher value of peaceful circumstances rather than action-oriented violence and confrontation in the mold of the classic western. Instead of uncritically accepting the value of frontier expansion and the moral codes of right versus wrong and good versus evil the film makes killing an unpleasant enterprise and innocence something sought after though never achieved. Normally ignored period details are also focused on in the film's length including outhouses, well-soiled brothel beds and the seemingly limitless mud of winter storms before the advent of asphalt and paved roads.

With Will's transformation from sober farmer to stone killer in the movie's final section the hero mythology of the West is also turned on ear. Gone are the easy symbols of white ten-gallon hats and sparkling, Christian vigor. Inserted in their absence are the unassailable rights of force and, through Little Bill's character, the demonstration of corruption at the highest level of civic authority. Patriarchal society is also limited in that Alice's whores set the narrative in motion by audaciously seeking retribution for crimes performed against them rather than passively accepting the justice of men acting on behalf of their own best interests.

Perhaps most remarkably Unforgiven gives considerable attention to the effects of the media in the creation of cultural myths, everyday news and accepted history, just as the entire colonial epoch of American life is symbolized in the conflict between Bob and Little Bill. With Beauchamp providing the voice of learning, refinement and encroaching civilization, the contrasting styles of violence in Bob and Little Bill are abject lessons in the difference between European centers of power and the independence of the American project. With the newsman present to modify real events and shape them for mass consumption, the innocence of the Old West is itself presented as a construction of types, events and particular socio-cultural needs to impress people in cities far away from the fray of pioneer life.

That Will and Ned are close friends steeped in their frontier right to act with amoral purpose for personal gain in corrupt circumstances, and that Will is white, Ned black, makes their combination in the film a further twist of expectation. Interracial partnership in westerns was heretofore largely organized for the benefit of white society depending on slaves and former slaves for continued comfort and dominance. Without ignoring the place of racism in America Unforgiven makes Ned the voice of moral responsibility but also the trigger for launching Will into his violent catharsis to end the movie.

Even then, with a shotgun blast cutting Little Bill's life short, Will Munny is a lone hero wholly unlike his forebears in countless previous pictures. He's steadfast in the justifiable nature of his murderous actions yet he's equally aware of his peril. Warning of coming disaster if he's not allowed to ride off unscathed into the stormy night with his bounty collected in full, Will leaves town with the stink of destruction all around him. It's a landscape of comeuppance and pain, success and failure, all of it waiting to be spun into new kinds of heroism by Beauchamp who remains behind with Little Bill's body to make a new history through the mass media and his own penchant for scandals.

As a symbolic description of the American project Unforgiven is dead on. It fractures the presumed strength of masculine dominance and splinters it through the penultimate American man in Clint Eastwood. Then it sets to reorganizing him as a person spurned through the death of a civilizing and feminine influence in his wife who made him long for and join a more peaceful existence away from the violence of frontier society. Finally he achieves his destructive state only in defense of true innocence as glimpsed in the scarred face of the prostitute Delilah (Anna Thomson) who, along with his children, remain the purpose of a better tomorrow.

While Unforgiven was the justified and most appropriate film to win its year's Oscar for Best Picture, 1992 saw the release of other terrific movies despite a summer season that may be one of the worst on record. Among Oscar nominees were the utterly original The Crying Game, the crowd pleaser A Few Good Men, the appealing costume drama Howards End and the totally overrated Scent of a Woman. There were also more unconventional films like Robert Altman's tour de force and return to mainstream consideration in The Player, Spike Lee's often overwhelming and JFK-esque Malcolm X and Abel Ferrara's trenchant examination of spiritual dissolution through Harvey Keitel's title character in The Bad Lieutenant. Quentin Tarantino's directorial debut, Reservoir Dogs, made its mark, especially in college towns and in midnight screenings, and Carl Franklin's unfairly overlooked One False Move saw its released to seemingly ambivalent mass audiences that missed out on a likable screen gem.

Altogether it was an exciting year for a few brilliant films that captured the public's imagination. Topping the list was Eastwood's career achievement as director, star and Hollywood personality and in Unforgiven's celebration as Best Picture the Academy was rewarding his career but also his courage to enliven old Hollywood genres with contemporary sensibilities and affection. This is not to say Eastwood and his production company, Malpaso, was unique or somehow original although his efforts in this vein are particularly notable.

It's not for nothing that David Webb Peoples's script had been making the rounds in Tinsel Town since he'd first finished it in the mid-'70s. With stars like Al Pacino at one time or another attached to the project its tale of career disintegration, personal transcendence and murder for hire was considered an unlikely commercial property until Malpaso picked it up.

Once the familiar crew was assembled around Eastwood as director and star working from Peoples's script, Lennie Niehaus was tapped for the score, Jack Green did the cinematography, Joel Cox edited the final print and Henry Bumstead designed the production. The cast was hired, locations were scouted, sets built, costumes stitched and an Old West canvas stretched across time to bridge then and now with a vision of redemption.

In the end, forgiveness is the film's legacy. Like a necrophiliac's pursuit Will Munny struggles for the grace of his long dead wife who singularly filled him with love and affection despite being a dreg on society and one of its most despicable criminals. It's as if the love of a good woman tamed the wild beast but in her absence the beast spoiled before finding a mission worthy of her forgiveness.

Unforgiven is that Panavision journey from worthlessness to fulfillment. It's the distance between a righteous code of conduct and being overwhelmed by mistakes in one's history. It's also one of the most satisfying films yet released and includes images of rolling storm anvils collapsing on empty lands with the rumble of thunder bringing with it flashfloods and a spirit of renewal.