The film co-stars Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, and Richard Harris and was written by David Webb Peoples.

In 2004, Unforgiven was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Eastwood has long asserted that the film would be his last traditional Western, concerned that any future projects would simply rehash previous plotlines or imitate someone else's work.

[6] In 1881, in Big Whiskey, Wyoming, a cowboy named Quick Mike slashes prostitute Delilah Fitzgerald's face with a knife, permanently disfiguring her after she laughs at his small penis.

As punishment, sheriff "Little Bill" Daggett orders Mike and his associate who was with him at the brothel, Davey Bunting, to turn over several of their horses to Delilah's employer, Skinny DuBois, for his loss of revenue.

Enforcing the town's anti-gun law, Little Bill, with his deputies, disarms Bob and beats him savagely to discourage others from attempting to claim the bounty.

A closing title card states that Will's mother-in-law found his farm abandoned years later, Will having possibly moved to San Francisco with the children, and she remained at a loss to understand why her daughter married such a notorious outlaw and murderer.

[14] Production designer Henry Bumstead, who had worked with Eastwood on High Plains Drifter, was hired to create the "drained, wintry look" of the western.

[15] Like other Revisionist Westerns, Unforgiven is primarily concerned with deconstructing the morally black-and-white vision of the American West which was established by traditional works in the genre, as the script is saturated with unnerving reminders of the now teetotal Munny's own horrific past as a drunken murderer and gunfighter who is haunted by the lives he's taken,[16] while the film as a whole "reflects a reverse image of classical Western tropes": the protagonists, rather than avenging a God-fearing innocent, are hired to collect a bounty offered by a group of prostitutes.

Men who claim to be fearless killers are variously exposed as being either cowards, weaklings, or self-promoting liars, while others find that they no longer have it in them to take yet another life.

A writer with no concept of the harshness and cruelty of frontier life publishes stories which glorify common criminals as infallible men of honor.

The law is represented by a pitiless and cynical former gun-slinger whose idea of justice is often swift and without mercy, and while the main protagonist initially tries to resist his own violent impulses, the murder of his old friend drives him to become the same cold-blooded killer he once was, suggesting that a Western hero is not necessarily "the good guy", but is instead "just the one who survived".

Film scholar Allen Redmon describes Munny's role as an anti-hero by stating he is "a virtuous or an injured hero [who] overcomes all obstacles to see that evil is eradicated, using whatever means necessary".

"In both works, the protagonists – Achilles and William Munny – are self-questioning warriors who temporarily reject the culture of violence only to return to it after the death of their closest male friend, in which they are implicated.

Both are committed to a "higher" cause—Munny to his children and his wife's wishes, and Achilles to the injustice of women-stealing and to Briseis, who at one point he would've had to sacrifice to Agamemnon to stop the war.

The website's critical consensus states: "As both director and star, Clint Eastwood strips away decades of Hollywood varnish applied to the Wild West, and emerges with a series of harshly eloquent statements about the nature of violence.

[27] Jack Methews of the Los Angeles Times described Unforgiven as "the finest classical western to come along since perhaps John Ford's 1956 The Searchers."

Richard Corliss in Time wrote that the film was "Eastwood's meditation on age, repute, courage, heroism—on all those burdens he has been carrying with such grace for decades.

"[22] Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert criticized the work, though the latter gave it a positive vote, for being too long and having too many superfluous characters (such as Harris' English Bob, who enters and leaves without meeting the protagonists).

[47][48] The music for the Unforgiven film trailer, which appeared in theatres and on some of the DVDs, was composed by Randy J. Shams and Tim Stithem in 1992.

The plot of the 2013 version is very similar to the original, but it takes place in Japan during the Meiji period, with the main character being a samurai instead of a bandit.