An Eastwood classic | Outlaw Josey Wales [VHS] | Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke

A crucial turning point at the amazing career of Mr. Clint Eastwood! | Outlaw Josey Wales [VHS] | Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke

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	• Outlaw Josey Wales [VHS] Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke Warner Home Video, 1990 average customer review:based on 182 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

An intelligent and surprisingly poignant film

I saw this in the theatre when it first came out and have always tuned in on it whenever I discovered it channel-surfing. It's a great, gritty western that puts you out there in the wilderness, but without using all the sprawling, gratuitous scenery shots you find in so many other films. The story avoids ending up as just a typical revenge tale for many reasons; the variety of characters met along the way, the period of the story - the end of a long Civil War, which left its devastation in the human soul as well as the towns and lands, the ongoing Native American tragedy and the Western Expansion. One can almost get side-tracked from the main plot line except that it all comes together at the end, as the friendships that have been established and the hard experiences that have bonded them culminate in a tense bar room scene that is a brilliant display of unspoken communication between both life-long friends and bitter enemies at the same time. Clint Eastwood pays his audience a great service by letting them in on the secret and you're holding your breath right there with him. Character development, something so ignored in films all too much in favor of explosions and special effects, really makes this piece shine.

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An Eastwood classic

Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales is one of his best,a tale of revenge by a farmer whose family has been
murdered by a band of Red-legs during the time of the Civil War. The cast is outstanding and the story line flows from the time the helpless farmer Wales sees his family murdered to the final climax when Wales now a hunted Outlaw and killer gets his revenge. eighty year old Chief Dan George is wonderful as an old Indian who has lost his way as the white man has pushed his people onto the reservation. Will Sampson is also excellent as an Indian Chief who becomes Wales blood brother against the Red-legs.

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A crucial turning point at the amazing career of Mr. Clint Eastwood!

The outlaw Jossey Wales remarks like no other film a before and an after into the impressive artistic trajectory of this legendary director.

After his family has been massacred in that brutal initial by the Red legs sequence, a sinister band of cutthroats allied with the Union army. So Wales joins the Confederacy to avenge their deaths. But after the war all the bunch surrenders to the victorious Union except him.

The film is a clear allusion to these Post Vietnam years in which nothing was so clear, where the flags covered the red battlefield accompanied with tunes of glory, amazing speeches and beautiful badges.

Wales suffers the transformation (like the iron reaching his melting point) from a humble farmer to a non believer outlaw. He tries to isolate himself just to find for his surprise there are another reasons to live and fight. Fight and redemption; bliss and ethical justice are his own inner voices.

The film that definitively turned on a landmark in his career. A masterpiece all the way through.

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Dirty Harry on a horse

I read the books this movie was based on. So I really looked forward to seeing how it had been adapted to screen play. I think they did a pretty good job at it. The only negative I have to say was it was too bad there were no actresses available to play the female lead. Where did they find Sandra Locke? At a truck stop?

Josie Wells wife and son are killed in front of him and he becomes a vengeful killer during the Civil War. After the war he heads west collecting a group of characters as he goes. He rescues a group of pilgrims (my usage of the word pilgrim here is in the John Wayne definition of pilgrim)among whom he finds the (gag) lovely young daughter played by Sandra Locke.

Entertainingly violent in the style of the modern western. Kind of like Dirty Harry on a horse.

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Eastwood's Greatest Western

The Outlaw Josey Wales is Clint Eastwood's greatest Western and perhaps his greatest movie. The movie is about a farmer (Eastwood as Josey Wales) who's family is brutally murdered by Union soldiers during the Civil War.
Wales declares revenge and joins a renegade group of militia men fighting for the South.
He becomes a skilled six shooter with a bounty on his head and uses the survival skills he's learned to get himself out of a number of precarious situations.
Along the way he attracts a group of outcasts as they head West and becomes the glue that bands them all together.
There are a number of mixed metaphors in the film and although Wales is a tough and sometimes nasty individual, one can't help cheering for him even as he outsmarts and kills those who are out to kill or capture him.
You frequently feel a sense of relief and compassion as Wales shoots his way out of trouble, most times with the assistance of the outcasts he travels with.
In the next moment though you're reminded of the brutality of the situation and the disregard he has for those who try to stop him as he spits a wad of beef jerky on their foreheads.
He's never fully at peace throughout his journey even after he settles down with his traveling group on land that the Comanche indians allow them to to live on. Just as you think Eastwood's Wales is ready to settle down for good, he has flashbacks of the brutal murder of his family and realizes he must continue fighting. He finally meets up with the "Red Legs" Union soldier (named for the reddish brown leather leggings they wore) toward the end of the movie and psychologically tortures him by firing his empty pistols at him until they meet face to face.

The only negative is the length of the movie, especially if you watch it on TV with the commercials. Other than Sondra Locke, the other actors are type cast wonderfully.

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Clint Eastwood fired the original director, Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff), and took over the reins of this project himself. He may have had a point: this brutal, thoughtful western, a near-tragedy about a Civil War veteran whose past comes looking for him, is probably Eastwood's most mature frontier drama prior to the Oscar winning Unforgiven. Hoping to build a quiet life in a cooperative community of settlers, Eastwood's Wales blames himself when his enemies attack the homestead, and he has to revert to his warrior instincts to help fend off the threat. The jittery intensity of Sondra Locke (who would be Mrs. Eastwood, at least for a while), and the screen-filling charisma of the late Chief Dan George harmonize beautifully with Eastwood, who had finally figured out how to add depth and texture to his stock-in-trade Man of Steel persona. This one may be too short on action to satisfy fans of Eastwood's Dirty Harry films, or of the Italian westerns he made with Sergio Leone, but it's an honorable effort. --David Chute

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