Dedicated to his mentors Sergio Leone and Don Siegel, Clint Eastwood's 1992 Oscar-winner examines the mythic violence of the Western, taking on the ghosts of his own star past. Disgusted by Sheriff "Little Bill" Daggett's decree that several ponies make up for a cowhand's slashing a whore's face, Big Whiskey prostitutes, led by fierce Strawberry Alice (Frances Fisher), take justice into their own hands and put a $1000 bounty on the lives of the perpetrators. Notorious outlaw-turned-hog farmer William Munny (Eastwood) is sought out by neophyte gunslinger the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) to go with him to Big Whiskey and collect the bounty. While Munny insists, "I ain't like that no more," he needs the bounty money for his children, and the two men convince Munny's clean-living comrade Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) to join them in righting a wrong done to a woman. Little Bill (Oscar-winner Gene Hackman), however, has no intention of letting any bounty hunters impinge on his iron-clad authority. When pompous gunman English Bob (Richard Harris) arrives in Big Whiskey with pulp biographer W.W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek) in tow, Little Bill beats Bob senseless and promises to tell Beauchamp the real story about violent frontier life and justice. But when Munny, the true unwritten legend, comes to town, everyone soon learns a harsh lesson about the price of vindictive bloodshed and the malleability of ideas like "justice." "I don't deserve this," pleads Little Bill. "Deserve's got nothin' to do with it," growls Munny, simultaneously summing up the insanity of western violence and the legacy of Eastwood's Man With No Name. After deliberately pacing the reemergence of Munny's pathology, Eastwood shrouds the climactic shoot-out in cinematographer Jack N. Green's dark shadows and heavy rainfall reminiscent of film noir, rendering Munny's return to Eastwood's lethal star form unsettling in its victory. Although Unforgiven was originally written by David Webb Peoples in 1976, Eastwood bought it in the early 1980s and waited until he felt he was old enough to play Munny as a grizzled veteran of a bloody past, rather than someone visually closer to the younger Eastwood of the Leone and Siegel movies. On its release in August 1992, Unforgiven was an unexpected serious hit in a season of splashy blockbusters and sequels, eventually grossing over $100 million and reviving Eastwood's star standing after a series of late '80s flops. After winning several critics' prizes, Unforgiven became one of only a handful of Westerns to win the Best Picture Oscar, and Eastwood's status behind the camera was finally acknowledged with a Best Director statuette. Appearing two years after Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves, Unforgiven helped to spur a 1990s mini-revival of the moribund genre that included Posse (1993), Wyatt Earp (1994), and Sharon Stone's "Man With No Name" turn in The Quick and the Dead (1995). With Eastwood's visual command of western landscapes and locations, and his perceptive grasp of the genre's mythology and his own place in it, Unforgiven stands as one of the great revisionist westerns.