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Jaimz Woolvett as The Schofield Kid
Although he does not receive top billing --- when you're dealing with actors the calibre and with the reputation of the likes of Freeman, Harris and Hackman, you're always going to get bumped down the pecking order ---- I really feel that between them, this young actor and Eastwood make the movie. As I've already noted, and as I'm sure was intended by the writer, The Schofield Kid (a name he has given himself and which in all likelihood nobody, bar maybe Ned and Munny, call him by) is really a younger version of Munny. He's the way he used to be: eager to get out there and make a name for himself, unafraid to kill, bragging about his prowess while never having actually having killed anyone and daring anyone to cross him.

In other ways, he's like an excited puppy, just itching for his first big adventure, but sensible enough to mask that excitement behind what he believes to be a cold mask of indifference and calm. The fact that his eyes are narrowed in the way they are, much like Eastwood's are, has more to do with his short-sightedness than any conscious effort on his part to look tough seems to escape him, and he tells nobody about his infirmity. It's only Ned who works it out (mostly from the fact that when they approach him for the first time the Kid shoots in every direction); Munny either does not care to notice or misses it completely.

But such a disability in a serious drawback for a gunfighter, especially one heading down to collect a reward by killing two cowboys in Big Whiskey, so of course it's understandable that he would say nothing, and hotly disputes it when Ned calls him out on it. There's no avoiding it though: unless the target is close up The Kid is going to be useless in a gunfight. This is of course the reason, or part of it, why first Ned, then Munny, kill the first cowboy when they're up on a hill: there's no way The Kid could even see the target never mind shoot him. But when the second cowboy is in the john, it's closeup enough that the boy can redeem himself, and kill his first man.
The transformation The Schofield Kid goes through is a tribute to Woolvett's acting as well as the story. At the outset, he's a brash, confident, arrogant kid who claims he killed five men and sees Munny as a hero, someone to look up to and emulate, someone to impress and maybe even outdo if he can. As it becomes clear that Munny is not any more the legendary figure The Kid has held in his mind, he begins to grow contemptuous of him, and when they find Munny outside the saloon, barely hanging on to his horse after Little Bill has kicked the crap out of him, The Kid stares at his broken body wonderingly and tries to find an answer: how could this man, this desperado, this scourge of the railroad and thorn in the side of the law, have allowed himself to be beaten up so badly? He rationalises it by concluding that Munny must have been taken by surprise, not able to go for his gun. Had he been able to, the Kid feels sure whoever beat Munny up would be lying dead now.

Then he throws on an extra layer of contempt by stating proudly that nobody would take his gun from him! This contempt grows as he watches his idol, now seen to have feet of clay --- or worse, just mere human flesh ---- struggle to survive and come out of his fever, and as the question rises as to whether he will make it or not, The Kid seems only concerned that should Munny die, the two of them left would be hard-pressed to finish the job. At this point, he doesn't care whether Munny dies. All respect he had for him is gone, and he is no longer looking at a legendary gunfighter, but some old broken-down farmer clinging to his pathetic life.

Finally, after he has seen what Munny does when Ned is killed, The Kid realises that he is after all the legendary figure, but now, rather than be impressed, awed or humbled by being in his presence, he is afraid, even a little disgusted. That a man could do that, so coldly, so clinically, chills him and he knows that, having experienced his first ever kill and not wishing to ever go through that again, the last thing he wants to be is like this man standing before him. Better a life of obscurity and have a clear(ish) conscience than to end up a raging monster like William Munny.

The wheel has finally turned full circle. At the end, The Schofield Kid has found the man he was looking for when he first rode to Munny's farm, but now he no longer wants to find him, wants him to just leave him alone and let him try to forget he ever knew such a man, much less wanted to become like him. They say never meet your heroes: now The Schofield Kid knows why.

Two sides of the same coin?

It's interesting the way Little Bill and Munny view women. The sheriff, gazing down in mild concern at the cut whore, shrugs and wonders if she'll die, but as mentioned above he's more worried about what he'll have to do if this turns out to be a case of murder: even dead whores deserve justice. But more to the point is that when he's warning Ned, as he whips him, that the whores are not going to support his story he tells him “Well now I ain't gonna hurt no woman.” It's important to Bill that it be seen there are lines he doesn't cross, and hurting women is one of them, although with a temper and arrogance like he has, I would hazard that there is more than one woman who has felt the touch of the back of his hand, perhaps even his fist, in the past.

Munny, on the other hand, when accused of shooting women and children, does not deny it. He does not excuse it, he does not try to explain it and he does not even condone it; it is simply a fact, a fact that he cannot ignore. He evinces no sorrow or regret that he did such a thing, broke one of the oldest and most sacred conventions of the Wild West. This may of course not be a truism: Hollywood would have us believe that there was an unspoken code in the nineteenth century West that women were off-limits, although certainly they could be in for a good beating if a cowboy was upset with his woman. But kill them? We are told not: both women and children were objects to be guarded, protected.

But really, how true is this? We can never know, without having lived through it. Contemporary accounts are unlikely to mention such a thing, if it happened, and as I say the movie studios, western writers and TV executives have all constructed this rose-tinted view of what must after all have been one of the most brutal and lawless times in American history (remember, it encompassed the Civil War), and want us to believe that a code of chivalry existed. But did it, then or ever? We hear lots of tales of knights rescuing damsels back in the dark ages, and even here, Beauchamps's book would tell us that English Bob shot a man over a lady's honour. And yet, while surely there were those who would defend the weaker sex, down throughout history women have been oppressed and used by men, so why imagine it would stop with the opening of the New Frontier? In a world where there was little if any law, who was going to stop you?

Whether this then remains the truth or not, it is the version of the truth we have been fed, and we all see cowboys tip their hats and hold doors for ladies, while they flutter their eyelashes and curtsy, perhaps giggling coquettishly. The ladies, not the cowboys! So to Little Bill (and most everyone else) the idea of killing women and children is abhorrent, and yet Munny seems unconcerned. No, that's not even right: deep down he does regret it, but he knows it happened and he can't change it so why worry about it, or worse, lie about it now? He doesn't even, to his credit, try to blame it on the drink, though he has told The Schofield Kid that he was “drunk most of the time” in the old days. Chances are, he knew full well what he was doing. Perhaps he enjoyed it, revelled in it, but even if he didn't, he sure as hell isn't going to shrink from the memory of the acts he perpetrated in his youth now.

It can also be seen as a tool; a tool, if you like, of terror. When you meet a man who stands there, rifle in hand, dead men at his feet and calmly agrees that yes, he killed women and children, you know you are dealing with one hard bastard, and your fear of, and respect for him as an adversary increases. You know you have little chance against this man, to whom not even the innocent and unarmed are a barrier, as Little Bill has seen, when Munny shoots down Skinny, who has no weapon, and thinks nothing of it. Perhaps sometimes it's good to remind people that you have the reputation you have for a reason, that it's not all stories and tall tales grown out of proportion and distorted by the passage of time and failing memory, or the need to impress, or make someone into something he is not. William Munny, the cold, narrow eyes of this avenging dark stranger say, in a soundless voice of death, was the man they say he was, and tonight, for a brief moment, he is that man again.

So Little Bill wants it to be known that he has not, and would not, (he says) hurt a woman, and William Munny calmly and coldly admits that not only would he, but he has. And it is the latter who walks out of the saloon, leaving the sheriff and his deputies dead on the floor.

Motifs and Themes

I'm not that avid a movie-watcher and it's seldom I'll latch onto a theme in one, but here it's impossible to miss. Rain. Rain and storm and wind and in the end, too, fire. But rain mostly. When we first meet Munny, at his farm, the weather, while not exactly what you'd call clement, is at least dry. As he and Ned set out on what will be their last quest together, the storm gathers behind them, almost as if it is following them, like a murder of crows or a whatever of vultures, knowing that where they go, death follows and there will be much feasting. For probably two of the three hours the movie runs for, the sound of falling rain is a constant motif throughout. It seems almost endless. We see Little Bill emptying buckets of water that have caught the rain falling through the leaky roof of the jail, and when he goes to apprehend Munny in the saloon it is teeming down.

But though the rain may be Munny's companion, it is not his friend, and is no respecter of reputation. It pisses down as he is kicked out into the sodden street, and as he lies there, almost unable to breathe, and it just as gleefully sheets down in torrents as he approaches the site of his humiliation, passing the corpse of his friend displayed outside, and again, when he rides off into the dark, sooty night, even though fire rages about him, making him seem like some avenging devil or even Jesus at the Harrowing of Hell, the rain drowns out all other sound, sluicing down as if to drown the world.

The end result of which, I feel, is that the overall mood of the film is not only sombre and dark, but miserable. As I said, these are not the deeds of heroes being recounted. This is not “How the West was won”, or “Stagecoach”, or even “High noon”. There is no glory here, no satisfaction, no triumph. Munny has been forced back into the life he has tried so hard to leave behind, forced to remember what he used to be like and to use that knowledge, that skill and expertise he had thought, or hoped, had deserted him, to bring the old William Munny back for one last fight, or properly I guess, execution, as he never gives Little Bill a chance to draw. He doesn't care that he's unarmed; to him, the laws that govern others, the secret unspoken codes mean nothing to him. They don't apply, and he ignores them the same way we ignore a fly buzzing around our face.

But it could be said, too, that the rain is a metaphor for the sorrow of his wife, perhaps watching from the world beyond, as she sees that in the end all her attempts to change her husband were for nothing. He held out for a long time, but eventually he decided of his own free will --- nobody forced him --- to go back to the life he used to lead, to be the man she had tried to make him see he did not want to be, and that at the last, he gave in to temptation and let the devil claim him. Or, looked at another way, it could be that this is a cleansing rain which, like the fire he leaves burning behind him, will wash away the sins of his past, sweep the board clean, allow him another chance at the life he wants to lead for the sake of his departed wife.

Or, you know, it could just be that it rained all the time they were filming. But even if it was unintended --- and I think not --- it's a powerful image, a sobering backdrop and one that grounds the film in the most basic of reality, reminding us that sometimes, quite often, life just pisses on you.

It's what you do when that happens that ends up making you into the man, or woman, you are destined to become.

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