Outlaw Josey Walesa great western by Clint Eastwood
Three years after directing himself The man of the high plains (1973), Clint Eastwood launched in his second western with Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). A genre that the actor and director knows well, being an emblematic figure of the spaghetti western (Dollar Trilogy) and having subsequently proposed dark and violent works, marked as much by the influence of John Ford as Sam Peckinpah.
In Outlaw Josey WalesClint Eastwood plays a farmer who lives on a ranch with his family during the civil war. He will lose everything when the soldiers of the north come to his land, rape his wife and kill his entire family. Josey is left for dead. But he intends to take revenge and will join the Confederates to achieve it. Except that, at the end of the war, Josey will refuse to capitulate, continuing to desire it take revenge. He will thus become an outlaw, with a price on his head and a detachment from the North that will chase him throughout the country.
Very popular in the United States (more than $31 million in local box office receipts), and less so in France (378,000 spectators upon theatrical release), Outlaw Josey Wales remains an excellent proposal by Clint Eastwood. A film of pure revenge brought by a character more complex than it seems. Sometimes consumed by hatred, he gradually becomes more compassionate. Clint Eastwood’s approach, realistic and emotionally charged, has allowed the film to be considered a work with a “cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance”. In fact, in 1996, Outlaw Josey Wales has been added in the National Film Registrywhich since 1989 has added approximately 25 titles each year for safekeeping at the Library of Congress in the United States.
A Ku Klux Klan member behind the film
Outlaw Josey Wales it could have taken another form, since Clint Eastwood wasn’t supposed to direct it. In fact, Philip Kaufman was filming before he even was returned after twenty days by Clint Eastwood. In an interview for Positiveexplained his differences with Philip Kaufman.
I was the one who hired him to rewrite the script and direct it. His work as a screenwriter was excellent, but during filming it turned out that our points of view differed completely.
Clint Eastwood then had a precise vision of what it should be Outlaw Josey Wales and I had spent a lot of time developing this project. The star had also invested his personal money purchase the rights to the book. Because there is a novel at the origin of this story. The Forrest Carter one titled The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales (1973). An author who, when purchasing the rights to his book, hid his true identity. Clint Eastwood didn’t know then that it was actually Asa Earl Carter (1925-1979), a supremacist and active member of the Ku Klux Klan.
In the 1950s he participated in violent events, most notably attacking jazzman Nat King Cole during a concert in 1956. Asa Earl Carter also wrote racist speeches for Alabama Governor George Wallace, as well as the slogan “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!“. Following the passage of civil rights laws in the late 1960s, the politician changed his speeches and got rid of Asa Earl Carter, who eventually became a writer under the alias Forrest Carter.
Source: Cine Serie
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