In the year of the United States’ bicentennial, Clint Eastwood released on audiences his first major revisionist western The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). Immediately one can see the influence of Sergio Leone in the plotting and humor of the film which Eastwood combines with a visual style derived from the westerns of John Ford and Howard Hawks.The Outlaw Josey Wales injects the romantic notions of the old west with enough gritty reality to make the genre feel relevant again without going so far as to debunk a national mythos. In terms of revisionist westerns made in the seventies The Outlaw Josey Wales exists in a kind of middle ground between the radicalism of Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) and the more conformist westerns of Michael Winner.
The titular character (played by Eastwood) starts the film as a farmer in Missouri. After Wales’ family is butchered by Cpt. Terrill (Bill McKinney) and his “relegs”, Wales takes up with Fletcher (John Vernon) and his rag-tag team of Confederate bushwhackers in Bleeding Kansas. At the end of the Civil War Fletcher betrays his men, sending Wales on the run with Terrill and Fletcher in hot pursuit. As Josey Wales makes for Texas he gradually accumulates a new surrogate family.
The Outlaw Josey Wales is a film about the cost that this country had to pay for unity. Wales’ situation speaks explicitly to the Civil War while the characters of Lone Watie (Chief Dan George) and Little Moonlight (Geraldine Keams) represent that cost for indigenous people. Then, of course, the characters of Laura (Sondra Locke) and Granny Lee (Paula Trueman) address the cost of national unity from the perspective of the settlers. The Outlaw Josey Wales equates the experiences of each member of this motley assortment of traveling companions that the protagonist hooks up with with one another. This is a highly romanticized view of disenfranchisement. Eastwood’s film may be willing to look at issues that for too long eluded the western film but he cannot help but re-write those same myths in the process.
The primary motivation behind equating the experiences of a Missouri bushwhacker with those of an elderly Cherokee man is to speak allegorically about the legacy of the Vietnam War. Eastwood is willing to re-imagine the history of the old west to get his message across that the trauma of the Vietnam War is a national trauma that unites all Americans. The Outlaw Josey Wales, in its neo-romantic way, presents western expansion and the unification in the post-Civil War years as its own kind of national trauma.
Eastwood’s soft approach to revisionism in the Western can also be seen in the film Jeremiah Johnson (1972). What’s intriguing about these two films is that they give modern Americans two new names of Western heroes. These aren’t the two dimensional types of heroes that exist in legends, these are heroes of the seventies who are only imagined in the past. Josey Wales and Jeremiah Johnson are far more morally complex than say the legendary Wyatt Earp. They may share a time and space with Earp but the real brothers of Wales and Johnson are characters like Travis Bickle and Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle.
