Home \ Signature Roles \ The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) — Clint Eastwood
CLINT EASTWOOD · 1976 · SIGNATURE ROLES
Josey Wales is a Missouri farmer whose family is murdered by Union irregulars during the Civil War; he joins a Confederate guerrilla band, refuses to surrender at the war’s end, and becomes a fugitive with a price on his head.
Josey Wales is a Missouri farmer whose family is murdered by Union irregulars during the Civil War; he joins a Confederate guerrilla band, refuses to surrender at the war’s end, and becomes a fugitive with a price on his head. Clint Eastwood plays him as a man who has lost everything and gained, in return, a code: he protects the people who join him — an old Cherokee, a young woman, a family of settlers — because no one protected his.
The film, which Eastwood directed, is a western about community as much as revenge, and its famous line — that dying is not hard for men like them, but living is — captures its melancholy. It was added to the National Film Registry, and it remains Eastwood’s most humane western: a killer learning, slowly, to be a neighbor again.
