Clint’s first demand is that the town midget — former chief Munchkin Billy Curtis — be made mayor. Curtis is a genius touch, with his leering, gargoyle like visage, offering commentary like a mocking chorus.

It gradually becomes clear that the whole town has a dirty secret. Their outward uprightness is a shaky facade built on selfish, moral cowardice.

The inner well-springs of each man, and each woman, is exposed in turn, as the town anxiously awaits the arrival of the “bad guys.”

It is a story of Augustinian grandeur, exposing the heart. Highly recommended.

The sequences with the women, unfortunately, are such that it cannot be recommended for family viewing.

The Preacher (Clint Eastwood) arrives, and to everyone’s surprise, is able to manhandle the bad guys, as well as drive a little bit of backbone into the miners.

The bad guys resort to hiring a posse that pretends to be the law but leases its services to the highest bidder. The final gunfight shows that the Preacher has some history with the bad-guy enforcers; is he not indeed back from the dead? No one knows for sure.

The story can be taken as an allegory of how “God works in mysterious ways.” Courage, doing the right thing should be chosen and “damn the torpedos.”

It is engaging and entertaining, which is what a movie should be first of all. The sounds — the hoofbeats, the clinking sledge-hammers against rock — are memorable.

The Savior’s name is taken three times. That’s a shame. That makes what could be a classic into something iffy whether it should be watched at all.

In other words, it is about euthanasia, a word coined from the Greek for “good death” or “pleasant death,” but which actually is a euphemism for murder, or self-murder, justified by criteria supplied by a society so addicted to its god of pleasure and pride that, when that god fails, the universe should properly end.

Eastwood attempts to elevate the film to the status of a true ethical dilemma by having his character visit a priest periodically to discuss deep issues. However, these discussions miscarry. The message, also consistent with the conceit of our age, seems to be that the mere raising of “deep” questions is a sign of spirituality. But those of us that have followed the career of Woody Allen have seen through the sham of that. Always learning, never knowing.

For plotting, pacing, and structure this movie is excellent, possibly Clint Eastwood’s best.

It is, I submit, objectively painful to see females boxing. One can imagine worse things, but one has to strain. How about: a girl wearing heavy boots and heaving a live grenade into a foxhole while being torn up by machine gun bullets.

But why subject ourselves to such images?

Perhaps the grotesqueness of the image is a metaphor for the theme the movie wants to bring home: fight and win, or die. That’s what life is. Nurturing is another illusion for the self-deceived.

That’s what life without God is in fact. I don’t recommend wallowing in it.