The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) Review
9/10
Missouri farmers are burned out by Union irregulars during the Civil War. One man buries his wife and son, joins a Confederate guerrilla band, and refuses to surrender when the rest of them do. That turns out to be the correct decision. The 9 is for a film that starts as one thing and becomes another without ever announcing the change. The first half is pursuit and killing. The second half is a man who can’t stop acquiring dependents and can’t bring himself to abandon any of them. What holds it short of a 10 is a stretch of the middle where the chase structure repeats, and a villain in Terrill who’s adequate instead of interesting. The film is far better at the people gathering than at the people hunting.
Few westerns sneak up on me the way this one does. It sells itself as a revenge picture, and by the end I care more about a talkative old Cherokee, a Kansas grandmother and a stray hound than about who gets shot. The repetitive chase stretch in the middle is my only real gripe, and it’s small next to everything else the film gets right.
The Revenge Stops Without Fanfare
The first forty minutes are a plain vengeance structure. A man is wronged, a man rides, men die. Everything in the genre says the film will proceed that way until the last reel.
Then he acquires an old Cherokee man who talks constantly, and the film changes shape. Lone Watie is funny, self-aware and entirely uninterested in leaving, and Wales doesn’t have the words to send him away. After that it happens repeatedly. A young Navajo woman, two dogs, a wagon of settlers, an old Kansas grandmother, her granddaughter, and eventually a whole town. Each one attaches and he says almost nothing about any of it, and the film pointedly never gives him a single scene in which he decides to accept any one of them. By the last act the revenge plot has to be resolved almost as an interruption, because the film has become about defending a ranch full of people who arrived without permission. The spitting is the running gag that holds the two halves together. He spits tobacco on everything, including a dog, a dead man and eventually a bounty hunter’s boots, and it’s the only continuous piece of behavior connecting the killer in the first hour to the reluctant householder in the second. I love the spitting. It’s crude and it’s funny, and the dog getting a mouthful is where the film tells me it has a sense of humor about its own hero.
A story that changes its own genre mid-book works when the protagonist doesn’t notice. Wales is still behaving like a man on a revenge trail while the film around him has become a domestic story, and the gap is the comedy and the feeling.
The mechanism is accumulation without consent. Each new dependent attaches for a reason he can’t refuse, so he never makes a decision the reader could object to.
Delay the moment he acknowledges it. The longer a character refuses to admit what has happened, the more weight lands when circumstances finally force the admission.
Chief Dan George
Lone Watie is one of the great supporting performances in the genre and the reason is that he’s funny on purpose and the film knows it.
He talks about being civilized, about meeting the Secretary of the Interior, about wearing a stovepipe hat so people wouldn’t laugh at him, and the comedy is entirely at the expense of the arrangement and not at his.
The sneaking up line is the best joke in the film and it works because it’s also an accurate observation about aging. He’s not able to sneak any more, and he says so, and then immediately shows otherwise when it matters. George was in his mid-seventies and had been nominated a few years earlier for Little Big Man. He plays somebody who has lost everything, is amused by his own situation, and is nobody’s wise elder.
Sondra Locke and Paula Trueman do the same job from the other direction. The Kansas grandmother is relentlessly cheerful and completely undeterred by a man who’s obviously dangerous, and her refusal to be frightened of him makes the household possible.
The Comanche Scene
Wales rides alone into a Comanche camp to negotiate with Ten Bears for the right to stay on land the government has assigned to nobody.
It’s the best scene in the film and it contains no violence at all. Two men who both know the other has no reason to trust him, and a proposal that they simply agree not to fight because neither of them has anything left to gain from it.
The speech about the government word and iron is written with real care, and Will Sampson delivers it without any of the ceremonial flourish those scenes normally carry. He’s a man assessing an offer, in a language that’s not his first, from a man he would have every reason in the world to simply kill on the spot and be done with it.
What makes it work is that Wales offers to die there if it fails. He rides in alone, unarmed in practical terms, and says that he’s come to give him either life or death. That’s the only currency either man has left.
I could watch that scene on a loop. There’s no gun drawn, and I’m more tense than I am in any of the shootouts, because Sampson makes me believe Ten Bears could say no.
A negotiation scene beats a fight scene when both parties have something to lose and neither has an advantage. The tension comes from uncertainty about the outcome instead of from physical danger. Give each side a reason the audience can state in one sentence.
The offer has to cost something real. Wales rides in alone and says so plainly. That converts a conversation into a wager. Avoid the ceremonial tone. Playing a scene like this as ritual removes the negotiation, and Sampson plays it as two men reaching a practical arrangement. That’s far more effective.
Eastwood Took Over the Direction
Philip Kaufman wrote and began directing it, and Eastwood removed him after a short period and finished the film himself. That resulted in a Directors Guild rule about actors replacing directors on their own productions. The circumstances are contested and the result isn’t. This is the film where Eastwood’s directing becomes distinctive, and the qualities are patience, wide compositions and a willingness to let scenes run past their functional length. Bruce Surtees shot it in warm, dusty light with a great deal of the frame given over to landscape, and the film is considerably more beautiful than its reputation as a hard revenge picture suggests.
The habit of holding on faces after a line is finished starts here and runs through everything Eastwood directed afterward. It’s the single most identifiable thing about his work and it began on a film he took over by force. The source novel also has a complicated history. A man wrote it under a pen name, and his earlier political life was very different from what the book suggests. That was uncovered after the film was released and has followed both ever since.
The Ending Refuses the Kill
Wales finally confronts Terrill and kills him. The structure requires it, and the film treats it as an obligation to be discharged. That suits me fine, because Terrill never interested me much. He’s a serviceable villain in a film full of vivid people, and I’d have traded some of his screen time for more of Lone Watie.
What the film is really interested in is the scene afterward, in a saloon, where a captain who has been hunting him for the whole film looks him in the face and declines to recognize him. Everybody in the room participates in the lie. They agree that Josey Wales was killed in Monterrey, and the agreement is the film’s ending, because a man who can’t be recognized is a man who can go home.
Fletcher is the one who does it, and he’s the man who negotiated the surrender that got everybody killed. He’s spent the film hunting Wales partly out of duty and mostly out of shame, and the lie is the only restitution available to him. The last exchange is about the war being over for everybody, delivered by a man who has spent two hours refusing to surrender and finally accepting terms. Nobody in the scene names what’s happening and everybody understands it.
The surrender at the start makes it work. The film opens with his company laying down arms under a promise of amnesty and being machine-gunned for it, so an agreement made in a saloon by men with no authority is the only kind he’s any reason to trust.
I find the saloon lie more moving than any gunfight in the film. Nobody raises a voice, and a room full of men quietly decide to let one of them go home. Fletcher looking him in the face and choosing not to know him is the reason this film sits at a 9 for me.
Discharge the obligatory climax quickly and put your real ending after it. The reader came for the confrontation and will stay for what follows, provided the confrontation really happens. The technique fails if you skip the obligation, because the reader will spend the ending waiting for it.
An ending built on people agreeing to a lie is stronger than one built on a victory. Everybody in that saloon chooses, and choices are what endings are made of.
Let the characters avoid naming it. The scene works because nobody says forgiveness, amnesty or peace, and the audience supplies all three.
Should you watch The Outlaw Josey Wales?
Yes. It’s a 9 because it starts as a revenge picture and turns into something warmer and stranger without ever announcing the change, and because Chief Dan George, Will Sampson and that saloon ending are as good as the genre gets.
It misses a 10 on the repetitive chase stretch and on Terrill, a merely adequate villain in a film full of people I’d follow anywhere. Watch for the moment an old Cherokee man starts talking and won’t stop.
