Friday, July 11, 2014


Movie Review

The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)

August 5, 1976


Published: August 5, 1976

Each time Clint Eastwood, in The Outlaw Josey Wales, kills someone, or is about to kill someone, or is on the verge of some other major policy decision, he spits. This is to establish the character.

Mr. Eastwood has established several pints of character by the time he rides off into the sunset fully two hours and seventeen minutes after the movie begins. A number of other characters are established by devices every bit as worn and dribbly.

A hard-luck but winsome Indian girl repeatedly gets knocked off her feet or worse; a sneaky boatman cringes and leers; a spry old woman bustles about with a broom, shrills out hymns, and grabs a rifle to shoot marauders; a doe-eyed young woman opens her eyes reindeer-size to convey fear, passion, or bashfulness; a young follower of the outlaw manages three distinct and radiant deathbed scenes on one bullet hole.

The Outlaw Josey Wales, which opened yesterday at various local theaters, is a soggy attempt at a post-Civil War western epic. Josey Wales, a peaceable Missouri farmer, has his farm burned and his wife and child killed by Unionist freebooters. He joins a gang of Confederate marauders, goes through the war—conveyed briefly by a montage of war shots—mows down a platoon of Union soldiers, and flees to Texas with a price on his head and an array of vicious lawmen and bounty hunters after him.

It is a long exodus, in the course of which Wales kills a great many people and, despite his contention that he wants to travel alone, picks up a whole variegated convoy of stock characters.

They are tedious companions on such a long trip, especially because most of them—Paula Trueman as the old woman, Sondra Locke as the doe-eyed daughter, Sam Bottoms as Wales's dying follower—overact beyond belief. Their lines don't help them. "Clouds are the dreams floating across the sky of your mind," doe-eyes tells Wales.

Will Sampson, who played the Indian in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and another Indian in Buffalo Bill, does a blue-painted Navajo chieftain and gets to say, among other things: "Your words of death carry iron." Mr. Sampson has specialized in displaced-Indian roles. As a real warrior Indian he seems embarrassed.

Playing a civilized Indian who attaches himself to Wales, Chief Dan George has moments of dry humor and whole stretches of damp whimsy. Mr. Eastwood, as indicated earlier, doesn't act; he spits. He is also the director.

The movie tends to muffle and sell short whatever points it may be trying to make. There seems to be a ghost of an attempt to assert the romantic individualism of the South against the cold expansionism of the North. Every Unionist is vicious and incompetent, whereas Wales, despite his spitting, is really a perfect gentleman.

There is something cynical about this primitive one-sidedness in what is not only a historical context, but happens also to be our own historical context. To the degree a movie asserts history, it should at least attempt to do it fairly.


Directed by Clint Eastwood; written by Philip Kaufman and Sonia Chernus, based on the book Gone to Texas by Forrest Carter; director of photography, Bruce Surtees; edited by Ferris Webster; music by Jerry Fielding; production designer, Tambi Larsen; produced by Robert Daley; released by Warner Brothers. Running time: 137 minutes.

With: Clint Eastwood (Josey Wales), Chief Dan George (Lone Watie), Sondra Locke (Laura Lee), Bill McKinney (Terrill), John Vernon (Fletcher), Paula Trueman (Grandma Sarah), and Sam Bottoms (Jamie).

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