Posted on 08/14/2024 12:38:54 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Anyone who’s enjoyed a career as long as Clint Eastwood and been in as many great movies as he has during those seven decades in the limelight is inevitably going to notch a handful of masterpieces. Still, on either side of the camera, he’s never been better than The Outlaw Josey Wales.
The debate over which entry in Eastwood’s filmography can be called the greatest has raged for decades, which is understandable when he’s got Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy, Dirty Harry, Million Dollar Baby, Unforgiven, Escape from Alcatraz, High Plains Drifter, In the Line of Fire, Pale Rider, and many more under consideration.
However, a combination of how Eastwood weathered the storm of production to emerge on the other side with a classic, what the film meant to both his career as a whole and the entire western genre, and the way it subverted traditionalism in favour of something darker, dangerous, and ultimately more compelling elevates The Outlaw Josey Wales to the top of the pile.
The man himself revealed that it’s the one movie people stop him in the street to talk about more than any other, an impressive accolade in itself, looking at everything he’s achieved. It’s both a successor to the Dollars trilogy and the progenitor of Unforgiven in a way, and that duality makes it intrinsic to the man, the myth, and the legend of Eastwood in more ways than one. Of course, it helps that it’s a masterclass in atmosphere, technique, confidence, performance, and execution, too.
If it’s good enough for Morgan Freeman to name it as Eastwood’s best, then who’s to argue? It even led to a shift in the complexion of mainstream filmmaking to further enhance its legacy, with the leading man not even planning to direct until he instructed producer Robert Daley to fire Philip Kaufman, instigating a ruling – colloquially known as the ‘Eastwood Rule’ – from the Directors Guild of America that prohibits an actor or producer from giving a director their marching orders and stepping in to replace them.
That’s beside the point, but it made The Outlaw Josey Wales a monumental production nonetheless. Coming more than a decade after Dollars and a decade prior to Unforgiven, the movie finds Eastwood at a pivotal moment in his career and in the midst of his Dirty Harry run. He’d starred in traditional westerns and popularised the spaghettified version, but it was here where his penchant for hard-boiled revisionism came to the fore.
A revenge story in a figurative, literal, and existential sense, the sins of the title character’s past haunt him in the present and completely alter his future when vengeful union forces murder his wife and child. In his quest for retribution, Wales signs up with the Confederate Army, already differentiating the film from the pack by having the protagonist fight on the side everybody knows ended up losing.
He refuses to surrender in the aftermath of the Civil War, only to watch the same man who killed his family massacre his fellow soldiers. With a bounty on his head, what follows is a quest for redemption plagued by the unrelenting necessities of violence, making Wales much more than the standard one-note western protagonist who shoots the bad guys and lives happily ever after.
The scene where he grieves his family was the rawest display of emotion Eastwood had ever projected in any of his films, with Wales reduced to a tear-soaked wreck. Not out of the ordinary considering the circumstances, but that heart-on-the-sleeve mentality goes on to inform the rest of not just the narrative but the main character’s journey.
After losing his real family, he even ends up finding a surrogate clan, complicating what he envisioned to be a single-minded thirst for blood that couldn’t remain unquenched. While many would point to Unforgiven as being Eastwood’s version of John Ford and John Wayne’s The Searchers given what it means to him as an actor, filmmaker, and persona, The Outlaw Josey Wales fits that billing better.
Whereas his Academy Award-winning favourite was a swansong to the genre that made him who he is, when viewing his career as a whole The Outlaw Josey Wales is the definitive connective tissue. It was one part Man with No Name, one part Harry Callahan, and one part William Munny, all soaked in the baggage of its leading man as a performer and personality, marshalled with a director who knew they had to pull out all the stops to ensure their reputation wouldn’t be ruined by the coup that put him there in the first place.
That’s an incredible amount of pressure, especially when it sought to deconstruct the essence of the classic western and Eastwood’s place in its history, all while telling a resonant and complex story that didn’t skimp on the action or shootouts, either.
It was a hell of a balancing act, and it’s because he pulled it off so effortlessly and timelessly that The Outlaw Josey Wales is the best movie he’s ever been in on either side of the camera.
Same with "Death Valley Days." Ruth Goodman wrote all of the radio show scripts from 1930 to 1945. When the show was re-worked for television, she continued to write all scripts for the first five years of production (1952-1957), at which time she became the show's story editor. The series required historical accuracy for its stories, breaking out of the standard Western genre plotlines, instead focusing on actual pioneer events.
She was an amazing woman! Her obit in the NYT, April 5, 1970:
Mrs. Ruth Cornwall Woodman, who created the “Death Valley Days” radio series 40 years ago and wrote more than 700 of its scripts, died in a hospital here on Thursday after a brief illness. She was 75 years old.Mrs. Woodman, a New York born graduate of Vassar, gambled with prospectors, “packed in” to Death Valley on horseback and visited rough saloons to gather material for the shows. “Death Valley Days” began on radio in 1930 and is still syndicated on television [written in 1970], making it the longest‐running broadcast Western. Its successive hosts have been Ronald Reagan, the late Robert Taylor and now Dale Robertson.
Mrs. Woodman, story editor and chief writer for the series until she retired 11 years ago, based her scripts on stories gleaned from old newspaper files, historical data and first‐hand research. She recalled several years ago that she had started the show as a copy writer for a New York advertising agency.
“The client's product came from the desert [U.S. Borax], so we suggested the program should have something to do with that area. “Then my boss told me, ‘there's one little hitch — the client wants you to go out there to the desert; he doesn't want anyone sitting back in New York writing it off the top of his imagination.’” The highlight of her first trip West, Mrs. Woodman said, was a meeting in mid‐desert with Death Valley Scotty, who built a castle in the forbidding valley and used to ride around in a car with a machine gun mounted on the front.
Mrs. Woodman, a descendant of Gov. John Winthrop of Massachusetts, became known as one of the foremost authorities on Death Valley history and folklore. She was married to the late William E. Woodman of New York, an investment broker.
Look at some of the directors of those old western series, there are some heavy hitters among them.
Like so much back then, people had lived a lot of life and they brought that to their art, their writing, their newspaper reporting, their acting, there was more depth, breadth, and knowledge throughout our entire culture.
Right you are.
WW I was still in living memory as was the depression and WW II. As you say, a lot of living in those people at the time. Writing about life on the frontier was a natural for them.
Plus, the frontier had closed only 60 years before 1950, so frontier life was still in living memory as well.
Even boomers knew a lot of people born in the 1800s, and an example of how current the West was to 1950s adults in Hollywood would be Wyatt Earp who died in 1929.
Hugh O’Brian was almost 4 when Earp died and would be playing him on TV 26 years after Earp’s death.
My own son probably sat in the lap of some people born in the 1800s.
“I found “Unforgiven” a little slow until the ending. “
Same here, but the last half hour is worth the wait.
That’s interesting. It’s especially interesting that the product came first and the show was created to support the product. The opposite of today when the shows are created and then they go find products to sponsor them.
I remember so well the Borax-o commercials during Death Valley Days.
Bump to watch - somewhere.
I’ve seen it but that was a long time ago.
Thanks!
Oh, my, exquisite! Thank you, Charles Martel.
Yep, nothing better than falling in and out of sleep on the couch on a weekend to a good CE Western.
Yes, the ending is climatic.
How is it on stains?
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;^)
Clint’s movies could be rough on the supporting cast.
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I reckon so.
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