The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
Clint Eastwood does not ease you into The Outlaw Josey Wales. It opens with an act of violence so sudden and ugly that you feel it before you've had a chance to brace yourself, and that readiness to start on a gut-punch and make you live in the aftermath is a hallmark of his if ever there was one. No warm-up, no throat-clearing. You're dropped straight into the grief, and the film builds everything outward from that wound.
What comes out of that atrocity is the whole picture: a Missouri farmer whose family is butchered by Union irregulars takes up a gun, turns outlaw, and rides through the bitter, lawless tail-end of the Civil War with a bounty on his head and a growing band of misfits gathering in his wake. It's a revenge story, yes, but it keeps complicating itself, accumulating people and complications the way a long journey does, until the man riding at the front of it all has become something closer to a reluctant patriarch than a simple instrument of vengeance.
By 1976, Eastwood had long since stepped behind the camera as well as in front of it, and this is him directing his own Western a decade on from the Dollars trilogy, where he learned the genre at Sergio Leone's side. There is a real pleasure in watching him take what he absorbed on those Spanish plains and bend it to his own ends: the narrowed eyes, the economy of a man who speaks only when words are absolutely necessary, the sense of an icon wielded by someone who helped build the iconography in the first place. He knows exactly what he is, and he uses it precisely.
It's handsomely mounted, too. The scenery is often genuinely beautiful, the cast do a decent job around him, and the whole thing carries itself with the unfussy confidence that would come to define his best work behind the camera. You can already see the director who would eventually make Unforgiven, learning how to strip a Western down to something rawer and more honest about what violence actually costs.
But I'll say plainly what needs saying, because it was the first thing that struck me: this is nowhere near the Leone films. Measured against the run I would put at the very summit of the genre, that five-star canon from A Fistful of Dollars through to Once Upon a Time in the West, the films I would show an alien who asked what cinema was, Josey Wales sits a clear rung or two below. The plotting is looser than it ought to be in places, the momentum sags in the middle third, and it doesn't have that quality Leone had of making every single frame feel inevitable.
That said, it would be genuinely unfair to leave the verdict there, because that is about the most punishing yardstick in all of Westerns. On its own terms, this is a really good one, and it has at least one element I'd put up against anyone's: the sound. The gunshots crack with a weight and a physical presence I'm not sure I've heard bettered in a Western. Each report lands like something solid and real, not the flat pop of a lesser production but a full, heavy, resonant crack that makes you feel the lethality of the thing. The sound design across the board is superb, and in a genre where so much depends on the rhythm of violence, getting that right matters more than people tend to credit.
Comparing it to High Plains Drifter, his earlier effort behind the camera in the genre, I think this is the more fully realised film. More humane, more willing to let other characters breathe, less interested in pure mythic abstraction and more in the muddy human cost of what his central figure is carrying.
So, not Leone, and Eastwood the director would go on to sharper, deeper work. But as a big, violent, satisfying Western with a commanding central performance and some of the finest-sounding gunfire ever committed to film, it more than holds its own. Just maybe don't watch it the same week you revisit the Dollars trilogy.
Three and a half stars.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 1976 | Watched: 2026-09-07
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