Clint Eastwood is a Western icon, so it makes sense that he would deliver the movie that was seen as a farewell to the Western genre with 1992’s Unforgiven. Eastwood directed and starred in the movie, following William Munny (Eastwood), a reformed killer living as a farmer, who takes a job killing a pair of cowboys who disfigured a woman.

Eastwood has already cemented himself as perhaps the definitive Western actor at this point, as well as directing some standout movies in the genre. However, Unforgiven was seen as his masterpiece as a filmmaker and actor. The movie went on to win Best Picture and Best Director at the Oscars, as well as scoring Eastwood his first acting nomination.

A large part of the praise for the movie came from those, including famed movie critic Roger Ebert, who saw it as Eastwood commenting on the Western genre. Eastwood himself announced this to be the final traditional Western he would star in or direct. However, when it comes to Unforgiven being the farewell to Westerns, that was too premature.

Roger Ebert Was Right, The Traditional Western Was Coming To An End With Unforgiven

The 1980s Was One Of The Worst Decades For Westerns

When writing about Unforgiven, Roger Ebert looked at how the movie’s themes of the dying days of the Wild West reflected the genre itself. With Eastwood starring in some of the best Western movies of all time, he was in a unique position to comment on how these types of movies were fading from pop culture (via RogerEbert.com):

Now Eastwood was in his 60s, and had long been a director himself. Leone had died in 1989 and Siegel in 1991; he dedicated “Unforgiven” to them. If the Western was not ᴅᴇᴀᴅ, it was dying; audiences preferred science fiction and special effects. It was time for an elegy.

Unforgiven subverts many expectations of Western movies, especially those of the kind that Eastwood would star in. The protagonist is a known killer, and by Munny’s own admission, a killer of women and children who is reformed. The villain is a sheriff seeking to keep lawless men out of his peaceful town through violent and sadistic means.

The movie also picks apart the mystique of Western yarns. Munny is an older man who has trouble getting on his horse, a famed gunfighter’s stories are proven to be lies, and the shootouts are panicked and messy. It seems to be a way of acknowledging that those traditional Westerns are no longer believable for modern audiences.

By the end of the 1980s, the Western genre was in a dire state. Flops like Heaven’s Gate indicated that audiences had lost interest. Even Eastwood moved away from the genre, with Pale Rider being his only major Western of the decade. Unforgiven did indeed seem like him acknowledging the end of the genre that made him a star.

The Western Genre Wasn’t Dying In The 1990s – It Was Evolving

The 1990s Kept Westerns Alive

Traditional Westerns were ᴅᴇᴀᴅ and gone by the time Unforgiven was released, but to say the genre as a whole was dying was a stretch. Westerns had fallen from favor before, and they took a new approach to keep them going. As the sweeping epics of John Wayne’s era of Westerns faded, Spaghetti Westerns and Revisionist Westerns took their place.

By the 1990s, Western movies saw a similar change. Tombstone came out only one year after Unforgiven and has been praised as a masterpiece of the genre. It ushered in a new era of stylized Westerns, like Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the ᴅᴇᴀᴅ and Jim Jarmusch’s ᴅᴇᴀᴅ Man.

There weren’t as many Westerns as there were in the heyday of the genre, but the changes kept them alive until the 21st century. The 2000s saw the return of Western adventure movies, like 3:10 to Yuma and Open Range, while the 2010s saw some Western box office hits, like Django Unchained and True Grit.

Unforgiven is a brilliant farewell to Eastwood’s time at the top of the Western genre, but it didn’t spell the end of these movies in general. In fact, the success of Unforgiven could have saved Westerns from truly fading from popularity by showing there were always new ways to look at the genre.