By 1976 Clint Eastwood had become the biggest film star in the world courtesy of a range of movies which are now considered to be classics: Play Misty For Me, High Plains Drifter, Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, The Beguiled. He played roles in films gravitating between 19th century United States and the modern day, often in San Francisco and it was in The Outlaw Josey Wales which he made perhaps his finest film of the decade, as director and lead.
Eastwood had already starred in Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy, the Spaghetti Westerns of the mid-1960’s which had revamped the Western genre and kicked it into a modern symposium, far removed from the humourless and right-wing John Wayne era. Yet while they were eye catching, slick and operatic, Eastwood was keen to re-visit the Western and to give it some context and humanity.
While he had done that in High Plains Drifter and would continue with Pale Rider in 1985 and the Oscar winning Unforgiven in 1992, The Outlaw Josey Wales is important as being a revisionist Western. Set during the American Civil War, Josey’s family are viciously slaughtered by marauding Union militants. Bereft and alone, Wales joins up with a group of pro-confederates and participates in the Civil war. This comes to an end when the North wins the war. The band are offered their freedom as long as they pledge allegiance to the flag. Wales declines while those who do are promptly murdered as war criminals. Wales witnesses the atrocity during his departure and sneaks back into the camp to take revenge on the killers before being forced to go on the run.
He is pursued by his former Confederate Captain Fletcher (played sympathetically by John Vernon) and manages to continually evade Fletcher and his pro-Union thugs. As Wales steps deeper into the West of America, he reaches the Nations – the Native American territories – where he befriends an old Cherokee man and a young Navajo woman who accompany him. This is unusual in the Western genre which had mostly “circled the wagons” regarding Native Americans, making them the enemy. Indeed, an angry John Wayne had to be pulled away from Sacheen Littlefeather at the Oscars only a couple of years before when she was sent by Best Actor winner Marlon Brando to decline his award in protest at studio treatment of Native Americans.
Wales eventually reaches Santa Rio where he vanquishes all but Fletcher who lets him go with the final pay off lines which this correspondent won’t give away. But it is a tour de force of a film; one which blends and re-appraises the landscape of the natives and both sides in the Civil war. To think they weren’t living cheek by jowl, that the lines were not blurred was a naïve and myopic legacy of the genre before films like this came along with the central message that people can live together regardless of colour or creed and that war is never the way.
While this is set during the American Civil War and subverts the usual tropes in the Western genre, it could be against the backdrop of many conflicts including those in the Middle East or Northern Ireland. The film refuses to paint the world in black and white. It doesn’t simply create protagonists or antagonists. It was a brave and bold move for Eastwood to challenge the film genre that made him an icon.
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