As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
Fridge Brilliance:
- When Munny shoots Davey in the gut, Davey calls out that he's thirsty and pleads for a drink, and Munny promises not to shoot any of the others so that they can give Davey a drink. Drinking water can be fatal to gut-shot victims; Munny, who at this point had not reverted completely to his cold-blooded manner (that happens after Ned gets killed) must have felt a moment of pity — the Munny of old, according to his reputation, surely wouldn't have.
- In his conversation with Delilah (the whore who was cut up), Munny makes it clear that he is not refusing to sleep with her because of her disfigurement- he tells her she isn't "ugly" like him, but they both have "scars". Munny's words have a deeper meaning than what's apparent: William Munny (portrayed by the granite-faced, but definitely ruggedly handsome Clint Eastwood) isn't exactly repulsive in a physical sense, and while decades of killing, thieving and all-around badness have given him his fair share of physical marks, he's by no means physically disfigured in any way, either. Munny is admitting to Delilah (and himself) that deep down he is a horrible human being, inclined toward all types of evil and a heinous disregard for the well being of his fellow man, and his soul bears the "scars" of his misspent life, haunting him with fever dreams and terrible nightmares.
- When Deputy Clyde is asked why he, a one-armed man, is carrying three guns, Clyde replies "I don't wanna get killed for lack of shootin' back." It is reasonable to assume that Sheriff Daggett told his deputy (likely as a cautionary tale) the story about how English Bob only succeeded in murdering "Two-Gun" Corcoran (and not being killed himself) because of dumb luck, coupled with the fact that Corcoran, despite what his nickname would imply, never actually carried two guns. Deputy Clyde seems to have taken that advice to heart... for all the good it ultimately did him.
- Little Bill isn’t just engaging in Insistent Terminology when he keeps referring to the people coming to claim the bounty as "assassins", he is making a very relevant legal distinction. The prostitutes have no legal standing to offer a bounty on a man's head, let alone insist that he be brought in dead. What they are doing is an open contract hit, and the men coming to try and collect are in fact "assassins" as Little Bill calls them.
- The fact that Little Bill seemingly takes no action against the prostitutes themselves for putting an open contract hit out on the cowboys makes sense when one considers that he doesn't have a single shred of physical evidence or direct eye-witness testimony to corroborate that fact. The contract has gone out by word of mouth alone, and knowledge of it only got to him through several degrees of hearsay. Even the assassins who come to the town to try to collect only hear about the "bounty" through several degrees of intermediaries. Until/unless Little Bill can get his hands on someone that will admit in court to being offered money by the girls personally, he doesn't have even the slimmest legal justification to move against the prostitutes.
- Little Bill is very quick to dispel the stories English Bob has been telling Beauchamp as romanticised nonsense and give a more realistic account of what happened with Corky Corcoran. Which is completely reasonable. However, the more you think about the stories he tells of his own exploits in his house later on, the more it sounds like he's talking an equal amount of rubbish about himself. He very specifically keeps talking about his dislike of "men of low character", which seems an attempt (subconscious or otherwise) to romanticise himself as a gunslinging hero of high morals just as English Bob did. As the film goes on, it's clearer that Little Bill is not exactly the righteous bastion of law and order he seems to be portraying himself to Beauchamp as.
Fridge Horror:
- Little Bill offers Beauchamp (and allows Beauchamp to offer English Bob) a pistol loaded with five bullets, but with the sixth chamber (which would have been first to fire) empty. By itself, that just fits Bill's flimsy grip on ethics and due process—he could have justified shooting either or both men "trying to escape"—but Bill doesn't prepare the revolver that way for Bob particularly; he just pulls it out of a drawer and immediately drops it on the desk in front of Beauchamp. Bill is too experienced a gunfighter to have left himself a reserve gun which wasn't fully loaded, meaning he had what is, in essence, an Old West drop gun ready and waiting for the right patsy to come along into his jail.
- As noted in the Fridge Brilliance section, Deputy Clyde carries three guns perhaps as a result of Little Bill's Corky Corcoran story, wanting to avoid a situation where he "[dies] for a lack of shooting back." At the end of the film he has a loaded gun and his target right in front of him; yet he's too wounded to use his weapon and is instead killed casually himself. Ironically, he dies precisely because he wasn't able to shoot back, but for a different reason than he expected.
