Although Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven came out in 1992, I saw it for the first time just the other night. It's not perfect (for starters, Lennie Niehaus' score is the worst I've ever heard in a serious movie), but it pulls off one very impressive trick: At the climactic scene (a shootout in a bar, of course--what'd you expect?), I didn't know what was going to happen, and I didn't know what I wanted to happen. I was filled with uncertainty and ambivalence, and what's the last Western that did that for you?
In that scene, Eastwood's hardened gunslinger-turned-hardscrabble farmer faces down Gene Hackman's shady sheriff and a passel of deputies. But that simple description ignores the situation's moral complexities. Eastwood is ostensibly the hero, and at that moment he's driven by a vengeful wrath you can sympathize with, so you're rooting for him. But he's also a man with a truly wicked past, and you feel--he feels--that his repentance is somehow insufficient, and that he should suffer as he made others suffer.
Hackman is ostensibly a villain, and his loose interpretation of justice sets the movie's plot in motion, so you expect him to pay a price. But he can also be seen as a pragmatist, a man simply making the best of many bad situations, and paying with his life seems grossly unfair.
Westerns are thought of as insubstantial because so many are set in a flat, featureless moral landscape--good is Good, bad is Bad and never the twain shall meet. They substitute grand vistas and action for complex storytelling--which, as Eastwood shows, can still be intensely dramatic. Eastwood can't pull it off the whole way through--the coda is perhaps inevitably disappointing after the climax--but I'm still thinking about "Unforgiven," days later, wondering how I feel about what did happen in that bar.