The Outlaw Josey Wales [1976]

Description

Clint Eastwood directs and stars as Josey Wales, a peaceful farmer at the time of the American Civil War who becomes a Confederate outlaw in order to avenge his family’s death at the hands of Union guerillas. His obsession with revenge slowly lifts, however, as he picks up various outcasts in the wilderness. Wales tries to protect his new ‘family’ by leading them to a safe haven where they can rebuild their lives.  The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Clint Eastwood’s 31st film as an actor, 20th as international star and fifth as director, was the first to win him widespread respect. Critics had grumbled when the producer-star replaced Philip Kaufman ( The Right Stuff) in the director’s chair a week into shooting. They ended up cheering when Eastwood delivered both his most sympathetic performance to date and–with the heroic collaboration of cinematographer Bruce Surtees–an impressive Panavision epic that stresses the scruffiness, rather than the scenic splendours, of frontier life. During the Civil War, Union “Redlegs” attack Southerner Josey Wales’s dirt farm and wipe out his family. Seeking vengeance, Wales throws in with a company of Reb guerrillas. Tagged as a renegade after the surrender, he flees west into the vastness of the Indian Territories, where, quite unintentionally, he finds himself cast as the straight-shooting paterfamilias of an ever-growing, spectacularly motley community of misfits and castaways. This is to say, Josey’s personal quest for survival and something like peace of mind evolves into a funky, multicultural allegory of the healing of America. Josey Wales is good, not great, Eastwood. The big-gun fetishism can get tiresome, and too many characters exist only to serve as six-gun (and at one point Gatling gun) fodder. But mostly the film is agreeably eccentric, and almost furtively sweet in spirit–a key transitional title in the Eastwood filmography, and one of his most entertaining. –Richard T Jameson Synopsis Josey Wales is a simple farmer in Missouri. When a vicious band of Union Red Legs, led by Terrill, burns his home to the ground, killing his wife and son, Wales joins a gang of Confederate raiders, determined to getrevenge.