In a new feature for the Tor UK blog, authors share their favorite scenes from film, TV, and books. The wonderful Brian Staveley, author of the David Gemmell Morningstar Award winner The Emperor’s Blades and its sequel The Providence of Fire, explains why one little drink in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven leads to so much trouble…
I was a sophomore in high school when I first saw Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. I hated it.
I’d been raised on HS&GS—Horse Shit and Gun Smoke, my dad’s acronym for Westerns—and I’d come to expect a few things out of a movie starring Eastwood. I expected him to grimace. I expected him to slouch indifferently in his saddle as he rode into town. And, more than anything, I expected him to kick ass.
In the opening scenes of Unforgiven, however, Eastwood’s character—William Munny—can’t shoot a can off a post at twenty paces. He’s a tired, over-the-hill gunslinger, a man who’s lost his will, nerve, and savagery, an outlaw turned pig farmer who falls in the mud whenever he tries to catch a pig. There are hints and intimations that he used to be dangerous, deadly, terrifying—especially when he was drunk, which used to be all the time—but by the time the movie starts, he’s sworn off both violence and whisky. He’s desperate for money—needs to take care of his two kids—and so he reluctantly accepts One Last Job. It seems unlikely that he’ll succeed at it. In fact, he doesn’t seem likely to succeed at anything. For the first four-fifths of the movie he looks, moves, and talks like a busted up old man. As a high school sophomore, I wanted nothing more than for him to get over it, to get his act together and start shooting people. That’s what I was there for!
[Then we come to THE SCENE.]