The Outlaw Josey Wales

1976  PG  WESTERN  2h 15min

CAST— Clint Eastwood, Chief Dan George, Sondra Locke, Bill McKinney, John Vernon, Paula Trueman, Sam Bottoms, Richard Farnsworth

MUSIC— Jerry Fielding  DIRECTOR— Clint Eastwood  BASED ON— The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales, or Gone to Texas (novel), by Forrest Carter

     Clint Eastwood wears two hats for this gritty revenge saga, one for starring as the title antihero, the other for direction. Eastwood is on the trail of the Union soldiers who killed his family and left him for dead. He falls in with a band of vigilantes still fighting for the South despite Lee’s surrender. When they are all betrayed and shot by one of their own Eastwood chalks that up as more death to avenge. But he must regroup; taking an elderly Cherokee native and a young Navajo woman (not to mention a constantly spat upon dog) along for the ride he makes his way towards Mexico, picking up more pathetic life forms along the way. It all leads up to the final confrontation between Eastwood and the blue belly scum that started all of this in the first place. An intense shoot-‘em-up that tends to lose focus in its latter half but still a terrific entry in the Western genre. Deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the United States Library of Congress National Film Registry.

OUR RATING— ***

FOLLOWED BY— The Return of Josey Wales (1986)