FAQ

Three gunfighters -- the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett), Will Munny (Clint Eastwood), and Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) -- arrive in Big Whiskey, Wyoming to seek a $1,000 reward for killing Quick Mike (David Mucci) and Davey Bunting (Rob Campbell), two cowboys who disfigured Delilah Fitzgerald (Anna Thomson), one of the prostitutes at the whorehouse run by Strawberry Alice (Frances Fisher). Killing Mike and Davey-Boy turns out to be easy compared to dealing with Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman), sheriff of Big Whiskey and an ex-gunfighter himself.

Unforgiven is an original screenplay by American screenwriter David Webb Peoples. However, Peoples has admitted that his screenplay was inspired by American author Glendon Swarthout's book The Shootist (1975), a story about an aging gunman with cancer.

Considering that David Webb Peoples' screenplay was inspired by The Shootist, which featured a main character loosely based on John Wesley Hardin (1853-1895), the most prolific killer in the West, it's possible that Peoples had Hardin in mind when he created William Munny. Another outlaw that has been mentioned as a possible model for Munny is Cullen Baker.

It reads: 'She was a comely young woman and not without prospects. Therefore it was heartbreaking to her mother that she would enter into marriage with William Munny, a known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition. When she died, it was not by his hands as her mother might have expected, but of smallpox. That was 1878.'

There are usually gunfights in most movies about the Old West, but viewers who have seen Unforgiven often name the following as among their favorite classic gunfighter movies, many of them classics: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), The Gunfighter (1950), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) (Once Upon a Time in the West), Pale Rider (1985), The Shootist (1976), Destry Rides Again (1939), The Magnificent Seven (1960), Hour of the Gun (1967), My Darling Clementine (1946), Rio Bravo (1959), Law and Order (1932), Tombstone (1993), and Shane (1953).