Eastwood's best film, in my opinion, both as an actor and director. I always enjoyed his "Spaghetti Westerns"-- they were a refreshing change from the predictable Hollywood variety where the "cowboys", with neatly-trimmed Brylcreem haircuts and spotless attire, were virtuous all-American types, which was a mythological innovation totally at odds with the historical record (guys like Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Clay Allison, etc., were killers for whom human life had very little value)-- but they were essentially violent comic books and Eastwood's "Man With No Name" (or "Blondie") a comic-book stick-figure that squinted menacingly and fired a gun with the accuracy of the Terminator rather than a flesh-and-blood character, with complexity and nuances. Undoubtedly, that was the way it was written, but even if a fully-formed character had been put into the script, it's not likely that Eastwood had the acting chops to convey that complexity. While I've always liked Eastwood, I never thought he was much of an actor, but he's obviously grown with the decades, and I thought "Unforgiven" was an extraordinary film. Eastwood was able to hold his own against the likes of Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, and Richard Harris. Eastwood's gunman wasn't a "hero"; he was an ugly, flawed killer capable of astonishing, even psychopathic, brutality. This is generally the way most gunmen are described in any of the historical books on the West that I've read over the years, and it's to Eastwood's credit that he had the guts and determination to create this unflattering portrait rather than the syrupy (and inaccurate) paen that Hollywood typically puts forth when manufacturing a film about the Old or Wild West days.