The Outlaw Josey Wales
by Clint Eastwood
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Bill McKinney, Chief Dan George, Clint Eastwood, John Vernon, Sondra LockeDirector: Clint Eastwood
Brand: Warner Brothers
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language); French (Dubbed)
Format: Color, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 135 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-09-09
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Warner Home Video
Movie Reviews of The Outlaw Josey Wales
Movie Review: Eastwood's first masterpiece as director and the finest western of the 1970s
Summary: 5 Stars
When I first saw "The Outlaw Josey Wales", probably the first couple of times, I saw it the way I'd expect that a lot of young people in the 1980s, the first "video" generation, saw it - a great funny action movie that could provide a larger number of potential drinking games than just about any film you could think of: take a drink whenever Josie (Clint Eastwood) spits tobacco; take a drink whenever Josey kills someone; take a drink whenever anybody utters the words "Josey Wales", whenever Josey says "I reckon" or "reckon so", etc. And it's absolutely possible and acceptable to me to watch the movie with that sort of fun-movie mentality. Philip Kaufman's screenplay, from Forrest Carter's novel, takes full advantage of the opportunities for fun and Eastwood doesn't shy away from the broad comedy and "cool" lines.
But gradually over the years I've come to see this Civil War revenge and redemption story as something a lot more than just a movie full of quotable lines and great action sequences - it's the film that first signalled that Eastwood was potentially a master, and one interested in more than just mindless violence and coolness. "Josey Wales" begins with a scene of pastoral, homey tranquility - a Missouri farmer with his young son plowing the ground under a beautiful autumn sun (the opening shot is one of the nicest in Eastwood's filmography), his angelic wife appearing dream-like in a dappled glade, telling the son to come wash up - and then tragedy strikes. In minutes, Josey's dreams and whole life are shattered, and he becomes a man bent on vengeance against the "redlegs" (Union-sympathizing raiders) who have killed his family and burned his home. He learns to shoot, and he joins up with a band of marauders headed by Fletcher (John Vernon).
All of this happens in the pre-credits sequence. During that montage as the screen goes to a blue-tinted, unsaturated look the exploits of Fletcher's guerilla warriors are shown; by the time it ends and we get to the film proper, they're over as is the war. We also hear for the first time Jerry Fielding's magnificent score, one of the greatest in American film history, in its wonderful drum-and-fife mode redolent of old Civil War marching tunes. Josey has grown a beard to partially cover the scar he suffered being attacked by the redlegs, and he has clearly become a fearsome gunfighter, and Fletcher has decided, as leader of the last band of holdouts, hungry and on the run and hopeless, to surrender. His men follow suit.
But Josey won't surrender, which turns out to be a good call on his part as his comrades are butchered by what turn out to be more redlegs under the command of Terrill (Bill McKinney), the same man who had commanded the raid on Josey's farm. Josey rides into the camp as the massacre is beginning and manages to kill a large number of the soldiers with a commandeered Gatling gun but his group are all dead except for the seriously wounded young Jamie (Sam Bottoms) and Fletcher, who has been pressed into Union service after unwittingly betraying his men. Josie rescues Jamie, swears vengeance on Fletcher and Terrill, and rides away, planning first to head to Indian Territory where he thinks he can get help for Jamie.
And the rest of the film becomes an event-filled journey towards Texas or Mexico (it's often not clear what, if any, final destination Josey has in mind) as Josey finds and loses companions, becoming bound up in a gradual community of similarly lost souls with him as the restless, never-named leader. Jamie doesn't make it very far but Josey soon gains an old Cheyenne, Lone Watie (the absolutely amazing Chief Dan George) as his most faithful companion and it's soon apparent that his actual vengeance will keep taking a back seat as he takes care of and fights for the growing surrogate family of misfits that eventually come to make a home on a deserted ranch in Texas. Finally in the last third of the movie, after making peace with the Comanche chief, Ten Bears (Will Sampson), it seems that Josie and his little community will have peace, and Josie himself seems on the verge of losing his desire to keep up the fight, but the redlegs have pursued and there must be one last showdown...
As I mentioned in the first paragraph, this is one of those great mixtures of comedy, action and drama that one can easily appreciate on a very simple level - there are very few westerns with more memorable dialogue -- but that for me at least keeps growing in depth and feeling. Josey doesn't say too much, most of the time, but his interactions with Lone Watie are always amusing and sometimes hilarious; he inverts the typical convention of the stoic Indian here by having his two main native characters (the other, Little Moonlisht, a young woman who Josey rescues from being enslaved by two trappers at a trading post) talkative and expressive while the white hero is taciturn and sullen much of the time. And Josey's way with guns is always impressive and also frequently engenders humor, as when he explains the order of shooting to Lone Watie after a gunfight in a small town where Josie was surprised by four Union soldiers (a bit of dialogue referenced to darker effect in "Unforgiven"). The story that's being told, though, belies the lighter tone of much of the early part of the film, and this is what sticks with me the most after a half-dozen viewings.
Much is said of Eastwood's two primary and obvious influences, particularly on the western and action elements in his career - Sergio Leone and Don Siegel - but here the presiding spirit is clearly John Ford, and amazingly enough in only his second western and fifth film as director, Clint manages to make something that approaches the best of that master's work. The Ford themes of the individual struggling to be both part of the new west of community and family and the lone frontiersman, and the ambivalent relations between races in "The Searchers" are reflected in "Josey Wales"; there's a shot of Josey in the bright doorway of the dark trading post that seems like a direct homage, and Josey's inability to give up his vengeful anger despite having a home, a community, and even a love interest are certainly reminiscent of Ethan Edwards' inner turmoil. And Eastwood and cinematographer Bruce Surtees' feeling for the land and the light are impeccable and have a "classic", unforced beauty that might be unbeaten in the director's work. I already mentioned the score, which at various times evokes Copland (the sequence where Josey and company first wander into a town sounds strikingly like the "Hoedown" section of Rodeo though it's the Josey Wales theme reiterated again) and at others the kinds of old Gospel and popular tunes that populate Ford's work.
But I don't mean to make it sound as if the film is particularly derivative, either; certainly the level of violence in the film is very much 1970s; the cynical and nihilistic attitude of Josey himself is at a remove from Wayne's Ethan Edwards, or any Ford character I can think of; and the dusty and decrepit western towns and the dark interior lighting certainly are more "modern", not at all "classic Hollywood" and would become themselves Eastwood trademarks. And the travelogue feeling and the unhurried pacing are also typical of the director's style; few western directors are as willing to allow their main "action" storyline take a back seat so often, and so willing to build to a climax in which the outcome really does remain uncertain up to the very end. Josey may be an extraordinary gunfighter but he's not the Man With No Name - he is a widower, a Missourian, a troubled and flawed man, and at the end we can't be certain in fact whether he will live to see the happiness which, finally, he seems willing to allow himself.
There are some small faults - the oft-derided Sondra Locke isn't in my opinion terrible, but she certainly doesn't bring anything to the film that any number of better actresses wouldn't have - thankfully her role is fairly small; and though I like the resolution more all the time, still I think the pacing in the last act is a little too unhurried even for a lover of films that take their own sweet time. But these are minor issues in a remarkable film that gathers all kinds of disparate influences and emotional elements - from Mark Twain, to Ford, to Siegel, Civil War to frontier, from broad comedy to Leone-esque stylized violence and finally to a deserved sentimentality and feeling that few of Eastwood's contemporaries can carry off without getting maudlin or trying for an unneeded transcendence.
Summary of The Outlaw Josey Wales
Studio: Warner Home Video Release Date: 09/02/2008 Run time: 135 minutes Rating: PgSimilar DVD Movies
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