Quality was secondary to just getting a picture out there, and the whole genre just played itself out, sort of like the Atari videogame crash. It’s a success because people had become sick of Westerns, largely because there were tons of them for about twenty years, because they were cheap to make, which is why spaghetti Westerns became a thing. And then Munny brings that whiskey bottle up, and you just go, “Oh… this is gonna be bad…” Okay, my favorite couple of seconds of the movie starts offscreen, and it’s the sound of a bottle.
Until the last ten minutes, when it becomes a revenge picture, and the old William Munny… Munny had become a man who didn’t abhor violence, but he’d lost his taste for it. I think it became successful because it was a look at what violence does to people, both on the giving and receiving end.
