Plot summary (with spoilers): In the Wild Wild West, tales are told and myths are made up out of whole cloth. Munny was a brutal killer, and there were lots of tales told about him. But he eventually married and had two kids and left that life behind and became a pig farmer. His wife's mother couldn't understand why her daughter married such a scoundrel. His wife died shortly after, but Munny stayed a good man, and a good father to his kids, and probably a good farmer to his pigs. (If that sort of thing is quantifiable).
In the town of Big Whiskey, Wyoming, a prostitute named Delilah got cut up by an angry john, he slashed her face several times, and the Sheriff Little Bill refused to do anything but charge him and his friend a fee of five horses. This angered the madam, Strawberry Fields, who then got together with the rest of the girls and put up a reward of $1000 for the murder of both the man who cut up Delilah, and his friend.
A youngish boy named The Schofield Kid approaches Munny and offers to split the dough with him if he helps with the killing. Munny wants to know what the men did to deserve killing, and Schofield Kid says they cut up a woman and cut out her eyes and ears. The Schofield Kid was a prototype Fox News reporter, I guess. Munny says he left his killing days behind him years ago, and The Schofield Kid goes ahead without him, but says he can catch up if he changes his mind. Munny takes about a day to consider, then follows behind, after spending about two minutes trying to get on his horse.
Meanwhile, another killer named English Bob and his biographer named Beauchamp show up in Big Whiskey to talk to the prostitutes and get the names of the men that are to be killed. But Sheriff Bill has a strict "no guns" policy and when English Bob won't give his up, he beats the wholly hell out of him and throws him and the biographer in jail. That night in the jail, Bill reads part of the book Beauchamp is writing about English Bob and corrects the many factual errors in the book. Bill exposes many of English Bob's lies and tells Beauchamp that Bob is not the badass killer he's presented himself to be and is actually a coward. The next day, Bob is carted out of town, while Beauchamp chooses to stay behind and record Sheriff Bill's life.
Meanwhile, Munny first goes to his friend Ned and asks him to come along on the killing spree. Ned wants to know what these men did to deserve killing, and Munny says they cut a woman's eyes, ears, breasts and fingers off. Ned is appalled, but not for the right reasons. Ned and Munny catch up with the Schofield Kid and soon Ned discovers that the Kid is severely near-sighted and can only see about ten feet in front of him. He tells Ned it doesn't affect his killing abilities, and he's still killed five men so far in his life.
They get to Big Whiskey, and by now Munny has a major flu. Ned and Shofield go up and visit the whores to get an "advance" on their reward money, and Munny stays down at the bar. Sheriff Bill and his men show up, and harass Munny and beat him up for carrying a weapon. Munny crawls out of the bar on his hands and knees, while the other two escape out the window. Schofield's convinced now that Munny is a fraud and tries to get Ned to abandon him, but Ned won't. They wait outside of town for a couple days until Munny's fever breaks.
Then the three go off again, until they discover both the original cowboys with some other men. Ned tries to shoot and kill one of them, but loses his nerve. Munny does it instead, first shooting his leg, then his gut. He bleeds out slowly, calling to his friends. Ned has had enough and rides away. Munny agrees to meet him at a later time after they collect the reward and still split the money with him. Shofield and Munny stake out the others at a cabin, until the cowboy that did the actual slashing has to use the outhouse. Shofield races up to the door, opens it, and shoots him dead.
Word gets back to Big Whiskey, where the prostitutes are less celebratory than you might imagine, the full weight of having commissioned double murder weighing heavily on their shoulders. Meanwhile, one of Sheriff Bill's men catches Ned riding out of town. Bill strips off his shirt and ties him up and beats him until he gives up Munny and Shofield's names.
Speaking of, Shofield and Munny wait at their appointed place and wait for a prostitute to show up with the 1000 dollars. Shoefield nervously drinks Scotch and confesses to the surprise of exactly zero people that he was lying before and he'd never killed anyone up until now. "But he had it coming, right?"
"We all had it coming."
Damn. Damn damn damn. How dark. And...well...unforgiving.
The whore shows up and gives them the money, and when Munny tells Schofield they're still splitting it with Ned, the whore tells them Ned was captured and then beaten to death by Sheriff Bill.
Sometimes myths are true. The stories about Munny are true. He gives Shofield his share and makes him promise to give it to his kids.
He goes into town. Ned's in an open coffin in front of the saloon, with graffiti and a sign warning about what happens to killers. Munny goes in the saloon and holds a rifle on Bill. It misfires. Bill reaches for his gun, but Munny is too quick and shoots Bill and four others. Beauchamp cowers in the corner and when Munny tells him to go, he doesn't notice that Bill is not yet dead and has drawn another gun. Munny kicks it out of his hand and aims at Bill's face.
"I'll see you in hell".
"Yeah."
Munny made it back home and took his kids to start a new life in San Francisco. His wife's mother never did understand why her daughter married him.
Review: There are so many themes and ideas rolling around in this thing, that it's hard to keep it all straight. We have themes about the myths of the Old West, and the way real life people get boiled down to one or two easy to categorize personality traits, and stories get distorted or even deliberately changed. It's easy to call Munny bad and Bill good, until we get to know them and see that Bill has just as much bad and Munny has just as much good. In the beginning of the story, we long to see the prostitutes get revenge on the men who wronged them, but then we see what that revenge really looks like and how hollow a victory it turns out to be. Perhaps my favorite scene in the movie came early on, when I first realized that this movie wasn't going to be like anything I thought it was going in. The man's friend, the one who didn't actually slash anyone, attempts to give the prostitute one of his best horses, as a gesture of contrition, but Strawberry has already sent out the call for a hit man to kill them both, and she can't accept that this man might not be the monster she has already decided he is, so she rejects the horse and throws mud clots at him. It's such a typical human reaction, to refuse new information, to open your mind to new ways at looking at something when your mind is already made up. There's nothing harder than admitting you're wrong, and also nothing more freeing. No one in this movie is ever really free.
We thought the cowboys were evil, we were wrong. We thought the whores would get justice, we were wrong. We thought Bill cared about law and order, we were wrong. We thought English Bob was a bad ass, we were wrong. We thought Munny was washed up. We were wrong over and over.
Clint Eastwood is amazing in this, Gene Hackman is as always, quite perfect. I question a little bit the character of Ned, and the fact that no one ever even comments on the fact that he's black, or treats him differently. I found that a bit hard to believe, but maybe I'm wrong again. It happens.
Stars: Five out of five.
Next, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", and then something called...oh here it is..."Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark". Sounds kinda corny.
No comments:
Post a Comment