And here we are, the last film on the list for my journey into the western. I would say it has been long, but it really hasn't been. I have torn through this list of 30 at a pretty breakneck pace and it was a lot of fun. I am glad that I will now get the opportunity to watch other things that aren't westerns but I don't begrudge any of the time I have spent expanding my knowledge in an area that I was only superficially familiar with. This has been a fun experiment and I might try it again with another genre soon.
Let's mount up for one last ride and see where Clint Eastwood takes us.
Film #30 The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
Here is the imdb.com cast listing (and a surprising amount of trivia about Clint Eastwood's sex life). Here is the wikipedia page about the production.
This film starts off with Josey (Clint Eastwood) tilling his soil with his son. His wife calls the son to get cleaned up, and shortly after Josey sees smoke in the distance and runs home to see his house ablaze and that his wife is being taken forcibly out of it by a bunch of men in with red leather leggings. He tries to fight back but is knocked unconscious. He wakes up to find the ashes of his house and his family. He buries his wife and child and just sits at their graves, broken.
Soon a large group of Confederate soldiers appear and tell him that the men that destroyed his home and killed his family are Union raiders, called Red Legs, and that they are going to go look for them. Josey joins them and fights for the Confederacy. He fights along side these men until the Civil War is over and the has South lost. The North is saying they are giving them full clemency if they just swear their allegiance to the Union. Most of the men leave to do so, Josey stays back, his war is not over.
One of the men to surrender, Fletcher (John Vernon) was given the word of the Union leadership and a leader of the Red Legs, Captain Terrill (Bill McKinney), that his men would be unharmed. As his men take the pledge, the Union army open fires on them and kills them all except for Fletcher and Josey, who is watching in the distance and sees Terrill and other member of the gang that killed his family. Josey rushes the camp and lays waste to most everyone and then goes on the run. He is a wanted man for the shooting of Union soldiers and for not surrendering.
Josey is trying to get to the Indian nations so that he can lay low and figure out his next move and Fletcher is being forced to assist Terrill to hunt down Josey. As Josey stays free of the army and the law, the legend of The Outlaw Josey Wales grows. People in equal parts are trying to hunt him down for the bounty or are assisting him because they hate the government for what the war has done to them as well.
As Josey travels, he starts picking up people along the way. He is joined by an older Native American who is fed up with the government trying to make him civilized while they keep taking his land, a younger Native American woman who was ostracised by her tribe and was working under duress at a trading post, a family of Kansas folk who think they have a better life ahead of them based upon the promises of a wayward son, and a roughed up dog that just happens to show up along the way. Slowly Josey is starting to care about those that are following him and it almost seems like he is finding a life after the one he lost, but violence is always looming on the horizon as Terrill and his men and bounty hunters are trying to take out Josey.
After the mind bender ending of High Plains Drifter, I was wondering if I was going to get another genre challenging western from Clint Eastwood. This film is pretty straight forward in its story telling and it is does feel more in line with a traditional western. The characterization of Josey is a little different as in he is driven by revenge but he still will stand up and fight for decent people when he sees them being abused. He will kill when he needs to, and without hesitation, but that doesn't mean that he wants to. He will survive until Terrill pays for what he did. I don't know if Josey is a true anti-hero, as he does do right by people and it isn't always for his own gain. I think that moments of his previous humanity rise to the surface from time to time. This is what keeps him from just being another grim bastard dealing out justice. Giving him a little complicated personality makes this a better story.
This film is really about family. The one he lost and the one he found. When you finally get to the homestead that was promised to the Kansas family and you see such an odd band of people all working together, you do feel like they are all home; even Josey, but he is uneasy about it. "When I get to likin' someone, they ain't around long," he tells the older Native American. "I notice when you get to dislikin' someone they ain't around for long neither," he replies back. Josey feels like violence will follow him wherever he goes, so he doesn't want to endanger anyone else, but he does like these people.
This is a great scene where he has come to talk to Ten Bears, a Indian leader that was planning on attacking the Kansas family homestead in retaliation due to an earlier situation where Josey took care of some Comancheros. Josey's talk about his words of death and life to Ten Bears show that he is a man that can bring death but is tired of doing so and just wants to make peace.
Clint Eastwood is great in this role, but that is not really a surprise. He gets some great badass line deliveries, some sarcastic one liners, and he gets to punctuate a lot of his statements with a spit of chewing tobacco (more on that later). And like I said before, he gets to show some vulnerability here that you didn't see in the other westerns I have watched for this list. This is the most human character I have seen him play and it was great.
John Vernon as Fletcher was also great. He didn't have the largest role but I really enjoyed his resigned approach that he had while tracking Josey. He knew that Josey would be smarter and more cunning than Terrill's men, and he would try to tell them them but to no avail. Josey was a friend and he didn't want to do this, but he also had no choice. I could have watched a whole film from Fletcher's perspective and I would have been entertained.
The Outlaw Josey Wales is a good film that provides depth and character to a story that could have easily just been about blood for blood. With the twists and turns of adding people to follow him in his journey, it gives the film a sense of hope that I have not seen in other films.
In the end, Josey is given a head start, as he is owed that much. Maybe he will finally outrun his past and get the peaceful future that he wants. Maybe there are army troops waiting over the ridge to take him down. We are left with no clear answers. I reckon that is the way Josey sees it too. You just got keep riding forward. Dyin' ain't much of a livin.'
Western Checklist (nowhere near official or scientific):
- Weird gang member names? The leader of the Confederate soldiers at the beginning of the film was named 'Bloody Bill' Anderson. That's a badass name. Especially if his real name isn't Bill.
- Did a house catch on fire? Oh, my yes. At the very start. It looks like they set a real home on fire.
- Any terrified horses? This is the mother lode of horse scares. There was one or two that fell of a ferry into a river, multiple ones tumbling down a rock hillside, and a couple were dragged down after being shot. Not a friendly horse film at all.
- How many Ernest Borgnines? I am going to give this to John Vernon. He was later cast as Dean Vernon Wormer in Animal House.
- How many things/animals did Clint Eastwood spit on? He spit on a scorpion, the dog twice, probably a horse, some snake oil salesman's white coat, two dead bodies, and one spittoon. There were other things he spit on too, but I lost track. He was just as accurate with his spit as he was his guns.
- Does it have a theme song with the name of the film in the title? No, but the score by Jerry Fielding (he also did the score for The Wild Bunch) is quite good.
Rating:
I am going to give this film 4.5 out of 5 tin stars. Good performance by Eastwood, interesting story of man continuing on with his fight after the war is over, good ensemble cast of characters, and an ending that didn't go the way you would expect. Highly recommended.
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