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Rating: Someone on this site told you that William Munny in "Unforgiven" is a bad man, a big bastard, a son of a bitch. Nonsense, because Munny/Clint is a wise old man who longs for peace when for half an hour he is forced to return to being evil as he was in his youth.
Here he is, the real son of a bitch Eastwood, in 1973 at his first direction of a western. The film has just begun and he rides into a town, sits in the barber's chair and takes out three ruffians who bother him, goes out into the street and drags a woman into the barn to rape her, getting up with his pants unbuttoned. He is a nameless stranger who seems to have emerged from nowhere amid the earth's vapors distorting his silhouette as he rides towards the town of Lago. He is frightening, and this is evident in the close-ups of the people's eyes that accompany his advance through the main street. He instills terror even in these townsfolk who themselves hide a terrible guilt, that of having the young sheriff John Duncan killed by three henchmen with whips because he had made the mistake of discovering that the nearby mine was actually owned by the state. After a year in jail, the three tough guys are headed to Lago to collect money and take revenge on the ungrateful citizens. And who better to face them than the stranger seemingly emerged from hell? He is promised unlimited credit and the ability to do whatever he wants, and he takes advantage by promoting the town dwarf to mayor and sheriff, evicting all the hotel guests for more comfort, sleeping with the wives of the "god-fearing" townsfolk, having all the houses and the church painted red, changing the town's name on the sign at the entrance to Hell, inferno.
It is hard to feel sympathy or identify with such an anti-hero; here there is no compassion like that we felt for William Munny. The stranger trains the citizens to shoot to face the incoming villains but then places them on those red-painted buildings just to have them better targeted by the bullets. We can understand why there is all this gratuitous sadism only when he faces, in an apocalyptic night amid the burning flames of the whole town, the three henchmen, tossing a whip that explains a thousand and no things.
It is an extremely sharp Eastwood that moves in a genre that made him famous as an actor, and to this, he thanks Sergio Leone and Don Siegel by placing their names on the tombstones in the town's cemetery! He constructs in three dimensions this pristine wooden town on the shores of a Californian lake to soil it and then destroy it with purifying fire. He puts to use the teachings of the Italian master with close-ups focusing on glances but quickens the tension in the footsteps of the American who had directed him in metropolitan westerns.
This is Eastwood at peak power: symbolic like Jodorowsky of "El Topo" (the dwarf/freak in power and houses as red as hell), more violent than Leone of "A Fistful of Dollars" (the rape of the woman, the severed ear, the branch stuck in a throat), as cynical as Siegel of "Dirty Harry" and "Coogan's Bluff" (violence to affirm justice).
At one point, the innkeeper's wife dragged to the bed says: "I knew you had no heart but I didn't believe you would go this far!" ...and Clint replies: "And you haven't seen everything yet!".
Well, in 1973 neither had we...today Eastwood is among the greatest American directors, would you ever have believed it?
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