Stars: Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke, Bill McKinney, John Vernon, Sam Bottoms, Woodrow Parfrey, Chief Dan George, Paula Trueman

Director: Clint Eastwood

Summary: A peaceable farmer sets out to avenge the murder of his wife and children by Unionist vigilantes.

As the film opens, Josey Wales is a simple farmer in Missouri. When a vicious band of Union Red Legs, led by Terrill (Bill McKinney), burns his home to the ground, killing his wife and son, Wales joins a gang of Confederate raiders, determined to get revenge. After the Confederacy loses the war, Wales sets out on his own, an outlaw who kills to survive. He eventually meets an old Indian (Chief Dan George, in a wonderfully sympathetic performance) and some other outcasts, and together they seek out a more peaceful existence. But Terrill continues to hunt Wales, and the simple farmer is forced to fight again. Critics did not take Clint Eastwood's THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES seriously in 1976. Today, many consider it one of the greatest Westerns ever made. Here the West is an ugly and brutal place, as it is in Sergio Leone's films, but this is a different kind of Eastwood hero. He has a name, a sense of humor, and a heart. Made in the shadow of Vietnam and Watergate, the film conveys a bitter distrust of government but also a longing to live in peace. Next to UNFORGIVEN, this is the most sweeping and emotionally complex of Eastwood's Westerns.

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The Outlaw Josey Wales(1976), Clint Eastwood's 31st film as an actor, 20th as international star and fifth as director, was the first to win him widespread respect. Critics had grumbled when the producer-star replaced Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff) in the director's chair a week into shooting. They ended up cheering when Eastwood delivered both his most sympathetic performance to date and--with the heroic collaboration of cinematographer Bruce Surtees--an impressive Panavision epic that stresses the scruffiness, rather than the scenic splendours, of frontier life.

During the Civil War, Union "Redlegs" attack Southerner Josey Wales's dirt farm and wipe out his family. Seeking vengeance, Wales throws in with a company of Reb guerrillas. Tagged as a renegade after the surrender, he flees west into the vastness of the Indian Territories, where, quite unintentionally, he finds himself cast as the straight-shooting paterfamiliasof an ever-growing, spectacularly motley community of misfits and castaways. This is to say, Josey's personal quest for survival and something like peace of mind evolves into a funky, multicultural allegory of the healing of America.

Josey Walesis good, not great, Eastwood. The big-gun fetishism can get tiresome, and too many characters exist only to serve as six-gun (and at one point Gatling gun) fodder. But mostly the film is agreeably eccentric, and almost furtively sweet in spirit--a key transitional title in the Eastwood filmography, and one of his most entertaining. --Richard T Jameson

Aspect Ratio:	2.35 Wide Screen
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	1976 Documentary Eastwood In Action, 1999 Documentary Hell Hath No Fury The Making Of The Outlaw Josey Wales, Introduction By Clint Eastwood, Interactive Menus, Scene Access, Trailer
Subtitles:	Arabic, Bulgarian, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish
Year:	1976
Release Date:	June 6, 2005
Runtime:	130 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	D 021517
Keywords:	Special, Edition, Wide, Screen, Wales, Outlaw, Josey, Westerns
Genre:	Westerns