The Civil War gets personal for Clint Eastwood in this Western classic
One week a month, Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by the week’s new releases or premieres. This week: Free State Of Jones looks back on the Civil War (no, not that one), so we look back on earlier Civil War movies.
The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
The Civil War ends at the outset of The Outlaw Josey Wales, but that doesn’t stop Missouri farmer turned desperado Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood) from continuing his conflict with the North in this superior revisionist Western from the legendary star. Achieving the mythic grandeur that he also strove for, and fell just shy of, with 1973’s High Plains Drifter and 1985’s Pale Rider, Eastwood’s classic marries the grand expressionistic flourishes of his spaghetti Western helmer Sergio Leone with his own more sober, straightforward aesthetics and attitude toward frontier brutality and survival. The result is a film that revels in the larger-than-life iconography of this hallowed American genre, even as it undercuts its romanticism—of tall men outfitted in wide-brimmed hats and gun belts, of horses galloping across the ragged plains, of squinty-eyed stare-downs and the fair maidens whose beauty makes them prey for marauding bandit—with a portrait of killing as a plague that begets individual and national trauma.
