My own personal favorite is Clint Eastwood in the movie “Unforgiven,” which was really a look back on his whole career (or sub career) as the Man With No Name in a series of Spaghetti Westerns. It is a wink, but much more than that, maybe a wink and a nod.
In those old Westerns, Clint’s character had been an uber-skillful, but largely amoral gunfighter, who only occasionally had a moment of conscience and never really had to deal with the consequences of shooting so many people.
But in “Unforgiven,” he plays a character raising little kids on a small farm, obviously ex-alcoholic and an ex-gunfighter, who by the end of the film kills a lot of men (as in the old days) but is obviously torn and self-tortured by having been that man.
The writer, Saul Rubinek in this film, asks the Clint Eastwood character, how he shot up a room of armed men: “Did you shoot them in a particular order?”
“I was lucky in the order,” says Clint, “but then I’ve always been lucky when it came to killing folks.”
In another scene, he talks to the young man, “the Kid,” who joined up with him on a murder-for-hire:
“It’s a terrible thing to kill a man, Kid. You take away all he ever was or ever was going to be.”
These are moments that work in and of themselves, but few audience members can really escape that the film is also (whether intended or not) a commentary on Clint’s Man With No Name character. That character (who actually did have a name — Blondie — in the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) has grown old and embittered by the memory of all he killed.
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