Clint Eastwood

A retired killer turned hog farmer takes one last bounty job in Unforgiven and finds the man he used to be still in working order. Eastwood shoots fast, in few takes and low light, and keeps handing men the bill for what they did: three childhood friends reassembled around a killing in Mystic River, an old trainer taking on a fighter he did not want in Million Dollar Baby, the battle of Iwo Jima told from the Japanese side in Letters from Iwo Jima after Flags of Our Fathers told it from the American. He casts himself against his own iconography and lets it look tired. You watch what being good with a gun eventually costs the man holding it.

Signature

• Few takes, a functional camera, no flourish.
• Underlit interiors and drained colour.
• American myth questioned by one of the men who built it.
• Age, guilt and the bill for competence with a gun.