‘Clint Eastwood is the most underrated director in the world’: This film legend was the first to defend the ‘Merciful’ filmmaker.

Having Orson Welles endorse your film is a bit like receiving an Oscar for a film you made. It is a kind of achievement, a bar that you can proudly carry with you for the rest of your life. And Clint Eastwood can boast of this symbolic satisfaction.

In the documentary, Clint Eastwood, the last legend of Clelia Cohen, director Orson Welles is invited to the set of The Merv Griffin Show in 1982 and defends the American director, who is praised in Europe but still little-known in his country:

“I want to recommend a Clint Eastwood movie. I’ve watched it for the fourth time: ‘Outlaw Josey Wales’. Eastwood is the most underrated director in the world right now. We don’t take it seriously because there are no pretty girls. They take a pretty girl seriously if she’s pretty, or we don’t believe it, That he can be a little ugly because of it.

“And an actor like Eastwood is such an archetype of the hero, the mythic star, in the John Wayne style, that no one takes his achievement seriously, but someone has to. After watching this film for the fourth time, I realized that it is one of the best Westerns next to Ford and Hawkes films, and I take my hat off to him.

You can hear Wales in the pictures:

Orson Welles is considered one of cinema’s most important directors since his first feature, Citizen Kane, was a formal masterpiece of its time, with a “rise and fall” story that made it a timeless classic. Suffice it to say that his endorsement of Clint Eastwood, at a time when he is still generally seen in the US as a star playing director, is a powerful and resonant voice.

• When Eastwood Was Fired Because His ‘Adam’s Apple Was Too Big’

(Re)discover “Josie Wells”

Josie Wells is set during the Civil War. Josie Wells’ family is brutally murdered by Union mercenaries. In retaliation, Wales joined the Confederacy. When the South is defeated, an armistice is declared for those who lay down their arms. But this is an illusion: the northerners executed the soldiers who came to surrender. It’s too much for Josie Wells, who runs away but finds himself well on the head.

This western is one of Eastwood’s best films, rated 3.8 out of 5 by AlloCiné viewers, but one that we think deserves even more. A gem a bit buried in the director-actor’s abundant filmography, but a humanistic ode and declaration of love for solidarity and brotherhood, hidden – as always with Clint – under the forehead and the persistence of violence.