Number 3 Most Wanted – Bill Munny (Clint Eastwood)
Unforgiven (1992)
Clint Eastwood’s appearance in this line-up was as predictable as the way the great man’s vote would have gone in the U.S. General Election. Up for more debate is which of his many dust-battered personas would be corralled onto this list.
The Outlaw Josey Wales? The Man with No Name? Joe Kidd? They’re all credible shouts. Even Harry Callahan warrants a mention as the definitive Urban Cowboy. But the Clint we’ve enlisted is Unforgiven’s Bill Munny. An all-encompassing representation of everything the actor has depicted over the years, all rolled into a character of genre defining career punctuation.
It’s a redemptive story for a man who has committed the good, the bad, and the ugly in a series of genre shaping guises, but Bill Munny is a tired spectre, one looking to lay his past to rest, and in parallel, Unforgiven is Clint’s swansong to the Western, his final step onto a sun dipped horizon.
Introduced falling on his face in pig muck, he forgoes the usual motivation of greed and revenge, because “I ain’t like that anymore, kid” having been “cured of drink and wickedness” by his late wife. Munny rises up to become a semblance of the man he used to be in the name of what’s sought by all men who’ve ‘gone done wrong’ in their life; honour.
