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First as an actor, then as an actor-producer and actor-director, Clint Eastwood has helped extend and reimagine the Western with startling persistence and consistency throughout his career. His gunfighter heroes are distinct from the detective who comprise the other key facet of his iconography. "Dirty Harry" Callahan and his ilk belong to institutions that no longer live up to their responsibilities, they are perpetually at war, trying to figure out how far one can go in fulfilling one's responsibilities without betraying them in the process. Eastwood's gunmen--in his work as actor-director, at least--enjoy no such organized backing. His Westerners are loners, outcasts, and outlaws who have to forge some coherent ethical code in a world dominated by hypocritical adherence to money, power, and force, and defined by an implacable landscape. Unforgiven is the harsh, brilliant culmination, indeed consummation, of themes, motifs, characterizations, and critical attitudes that have evolved in Clint Eastwood's Westerns for more than 30 years.
In the mid Fifties, Eastwood had been slowly and unspectacularly working his way toward featured-player status in a handful of films (including three Westerns: The First Traveling Saleslady, Star in the Dust, Ambush at Cimarron Pass) and had made guest appearances on TV's Wagon Train and Maverick. His first career breakthrough came with his casting as Rowdy Yates, the second lead on CBS-TV's Rawhide series. Though his stint on Rawhide ran seven years, from January 1959 to January 1966, it has been treated as a career footnote--merely the means of giving him enough visibility to attract the attention of Sergio Leone after the Italian director had failed to land bigger names for A Fistful of Dollars. Yet the very fact that Eastwood achieved his lasting fame with ferocious subversions of Western conventions lends a special significance to the seven years he spent playing by the rules.
Besides, Western stars have always tended to establish their physical images early in their careers and hew to them forever after, as physical reflections of moral character. It was in Rawhide that Eastwood adopted the flat-crowned, wide-brimmed hat that would remain his trademark. Although he claims to have chosen that particular style for the disappointingly mundane reason that he needed something to shade his sun-sensitive eyes, the hat had an immediate and...