Once you get past the conservative cultural trappings, however, "Every Which Way but Loose" has nothing at all to do with meting out justice, upholding the law, or any of the other political tropes that were thrown Eastwood's way at the time. Beddoe may be charming (and, like Eastwood himself, fond of animals), but he is essentially a miscreant -- an unproductive member of society who picks fights constantly and very nearly at random, and almost always throws the first punch. Indeed, the reason for his ongoing difficulties with the two policemen is that he assaulted them in a bar without provocation. Had Beddoe been played by Jack Nicholson or Dennis Hopper, he would doubtless have been seen as exactly the kind of anarchistic free spirit that liberal audiences applauded and conservative ones reviled.

The dramatic reevaluation of Eastwood's work over the last decade has similarly been driven at least as much by tone as by content. Take "Unforgiven," the film in which Eastwood is generally considered to have fundamentally altered his approach to violence. If "Magnum Force" represented a radically different story told in a style similar to that of his previous ones, "Unforgiven" was just the opposite: a familiar storyline about a relentless avenger told in a different key, more tragic than heroic. Eastwood's character, Will Munny, is a formerly heartless killer domesticated by the love of a good woman who has since passed away. In an effort to raise money for his two young children, he accepts a lucrative commission to kill two cowboys who had cut up the face of a prostitute. After he and his two partners (an old friend played by Morgan Freeman and a boastful youngster played by Jaimz Woolvett) arrive in the town where the job is to take place, Eastwood endures life-threatening illness, a savage beating by the town sheriff (Gene Hackman), and his partners' discovery that they lack the stomach for killing. After his commission is completed, Eastwood learns that Freeman was caught on his way home and beaten to death by Hackman, and he wreaks a bloody vengeance on the town, killing the sheriff and several other men before mounting his horse and riding off.

As David Edelstein noted in a smart 2003 article in the New York Times, the concluding bloodbath makes "Unforgiven" at best an ambivalently anti-vigilantism film. (Indeed, the film's last spoken line is Eastwood threatening the townsfolk, "You better bury [Freeman] right. You better not cut up nor otherwise harm no whores. Or I'll come back and kill every one of you sons of bitches.") Yes, it's clear Eastwood knows that on some level what he has done is wrong, and that it will haunt him the way his earlier killings haunted him throughout the film. But his life goes on, and apparently not too unhappily -- a postscript informs us that he's rumored to have taken his children to San Francisco and prospered there. Moreover, Eastwood's retribution isn't presented as unambiguously evil. Freeman was a decent, gentle man and Hackman a sadistic monster. Finally, the lethal, commanding avenger that Eastwood has become by the film's end is a vastly more imposing figure than the clumsy, tentative farmer he is at the beginning. In killing, he has rediscovered his true self. Was "Unforgiven" a deliberate subversion of Eastwood's vigilante persona? Of course. But a "full-scale, systematic act of contrition, a repudiation and dismantling of the whole legendary, masculine character type," as Grenier said? Hardly.

Eastwood went further with 2003's "Mystic River," tackling the question of certainty: Even if a crime has been committed that merits death, what happens if you kill the wrong person? (His mediocre 1999 capital-punishment film "True Crime" could be seen as a dry run for this subject.) "Mystic River" concerns three friends, played by Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon. As a boy, Robbins was abducted by pedophiles, who kept him for several days before he managed to escape; as an adult, he is "damaged goods," shambling through life like a zombie. Penn, meanwhile, is a tough ex-con who owns a grocery store; Bacon, a cop.

One night, Penn's beautiful teenage daughter is brutally murdered; that same night, Robbins comes home covered with blood, which he explains away with a series of shifting stories. Believing that Robbins killed his daughter, Penn ultimately executes him. But Robbins was not the daughter's killer, and Penn must come to terms with the fact that he has killed not only a friend but also an innocent man. As with Will Munny in "Unforgiven," it's clear that this fatal error will weigh on Penn's conscience in the years to come, though again it's not entirely clear how heavily. Like Munny, Penn seems to have recovered a source of personal strength in his willingness to avenge -- even wrongly -- those he loves. (Penn's wife, played by Laura Linney, certainly feels this way, telling him, "You're a king. And a king knows what to do and does it, even when it's hard.")

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