The Outlaw Josey Wales

Origin: U.S (Malpaso) 1976
Length: 135 minutes
Format: Color
Director: Clint Eastwood
Producer: Robert Daley
Screenplay: Sonia Chernus, Phillip Kaufman, from the novel Gone to Texas by Forrest Carter
Photography: Bruce Surtees
Music: Jerry Fielding
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Chief Dan George, Sondra Locke, Bill McKinney, John Vernon, Paula Trueman, Sam Bottoms, Geraldine Keams, Woodrow Parfrey, Joyce Jameson, Sheb Wooley, Royal Dano, Matt Clark, John Verros, Will Sampson
Oscar Nominations: Jerry Fielding(music)
Links: Outlaw Josey Wales Wiki, Forrest Carter Wiki

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A truly great Western, and probably director-star Clint Eastwood's all-round best picture. Josey Wales is the typical Eastwood character-a scarred, vengeance crazed, super skilled die-hard gunman who refuses to surrender after the Civil War is over and heads for Texas with hordes of scurvy bounty killers on his trail. Though the film racks up a genocidal body count as Josey guns down assorted human filth, it develops a surprising warm streak as the grim hero gradually loses his loner status by collecting a retinue of waifs and strays who finally form a community in the West that enables him to set aside his guns and settle down.

The movie Unforgiven(1992) is considered a despairing thematic sequal to this film.

In 1996, this film was placed in the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in their National Film Registry.

This film is considered by many enthusiasts to be one of the greatest westerns ever made, including Johnny Carson and Eastwood himself, who has been quoted as saying that "The Outlaw Josey Wales" is his favorite of all the movies he has made.