Written by Old Bluffer 17th Apr 2007

Ned is an ageing gunslinger with a past he'd rather forget. Now in the twilight of his life, he wants nothing more than to live out his final years in obscurity with his partner, Sally Two-Trees. For Ned Logan used to run with William Munny - a notorious and ruthless criminal responsible for the deaths of many innocents.

Munny is also living in peaceful retirement, but he agrees to do "one last job", which involves visiting retribution on two cowboys who brutally abused and assaulted a prostitute. This information is given to him by the "Schofield Kid", who tells him:

"I'm gonna kill a couple of no-good cowboys...for cuttin' up a lady. They cut up her face, cut her eyes out, cut her ears off, hell, they even cut her teats...A thousand dollars reward, Will. Five hundred apiece."

This story isn't strictly accurate. The girl's face has been cut up and scarred, but she is otherwise intact. But tales of violence have a way of growing in the telling - indeed, when Munny decides he needs his old partner to help him, he adds his own extra detail that her fingers were also sliced off.

This has the desired effect of outraging Ned, and the sizeable reward money can't have hurt either.

This reward money has been raised by the whores who worked with the victim, after they were sickened by the justice meted out on the pair of captured cowboys by their own sherriff, Little Bill Daggett. In an uncomfortably plausible scene, Bill is shown to decide that rather than going to the trouble of a formal trial, an old fashioned bull whipping will suffice as a punishment. When the whores' pimp protests that his "property" has been irrevocably damaged, Bill changes his mind and eventually compensation is agreed upon in the form of five ponies (and no whipping). Incensed by this casual verdict, the whores take justice into their own hands, and put out a formal bounty on the cowboys' heads.

Against his better judgement, Ned joins Munny and the Schofield Kid, but his heart is never really in it. Before any of the cowboys are killed, he heads back home, but is apprehended by Little Bill, who is on the lookout for bounty hunters showing up in his territory.

In previous scenes Bill is shown to be utterly brutal in his treatment of outsiders, so Ned was always going to receive a sound thrashing. Unfortunately for him though, Bill knows he has accomplices, and means to beat the names of them out of him.

After being bull whipped, Bill leans in close to the elderly man, and says softly:

"Now Ned, them whores are going to tell different lies than you. And
when their lies ain't the same as your lies... Well, I ain't gonna hurt
no woman. But I'm gonna hurt you. And not gentle like before... but
bad."

This may look like Lex Luther, but this is Gene Hackman in full on Hateful B****** mode.

Later on, a whore rides out to Munny and the 'Kid to pay them their bounty, and it is then that we learn that Ned didn't survive his ordeal.

She tells Munny that Little Bill probably didn't mean for Ned to die, but he'd inflicted so much pain on him that Ned had cracked. She also tells him that Ned's body is strung up outside the saloon with a warning sign to other "assassins" on it.

Old man or not, Munny isn't going to let this treatment of his friend go unavenged, and he rides off alone towards the saloon with murderous intent...


This sign doesn't seem to scare Will Munny...