The Rewind: Gene Hackman and Val Kilmer Elevated Two of the Best Westerns Ever

Their towering performances in 'Unforgiven' and 'Tombstone' still shimmer with precision and mystery.

In just over a year, two dynamite Westerns—Unforgiven (1992) and Tombstone (1993)—were released, each bolstered by one of the finest, most indisputable supporting performances of the 20th century. And in just the past couple of months, we’ve lost both of those actors: Gene Hackman and Val Kilmer.

Unforgiven is a Clint Eastwood movie that Hackman nearly hijacks from under him. Eastwood brought his whole connotative history to the film—all growls and glares, feinting self-knowingly at the legend of himself. And while there’s supreme pleasure in his gruff inscrutability, there’s even more fun to be had with Hackman as the villain of the piece, Sheriff Bill Daggett.

His polite authoritarianism and clipped civility thinly veil a brutal core. This is a man who tortures someone in broad daylight, then scolds his deputy about decorum. There’s nothing overly theatrical about it—just a chillingly wry, pathological efficiency.

Hackman represented an urbane kind of evil in Unforgiven

He and Eastwood are two sides of the same violent, relentless coin, with Eastwood’s William Munny representing a hard-scrabble traditionalism and Hackman embodying a mischievously evil, corrupt modernism. Munny believes himself to be a bad man, though he’s on the path to righteousness. Daggett thinks he’s a pillar of the community, yet his sadistic rot lies barely beneath the surface.

The two are evenly counterbalanced so that neither quite steals the movie from the other—like Heath Ledger’s Joker does to Christian Bale’s Batman in The Dark Knight—but it’s hard not to watch Hackman and think, in spite of all his wickedness, that this is a nasty, urbane survivor cut out to cheat and thrive in a hard world, whether in 1880s Wyoming or in the political arena of 2025.

His charming irascibility—in this movie and others—has an undeniably timeless quality. Hackman never simply played villains; he embodied lethal professionals with priorities, often dangerously misguided ones.

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