Word: josey
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...OUTLAW JOSEY WALES. Clint EaStwood directs and stars in a self-consciously classic western, in which bloody circumstances turn a peaceable man into a vengeful killer. He carries his grudge over many years and half a continent before he can lay his ghosts to rest. Josey Wales recalls just how satisfying this once great popular form...
...Outlaw Josey Wales, 7, 9:30 p.m., through Tuesday...
...Josey Wales' situation is a classic one for a western hero. A peaceable border-state farmer in the days before the Civil War, he is attacked by Northern guerrillas. His farm is burned out, his wife and child killed. That causes him to join some Southern guerrillas and fight vengefully through the war. Then he sees his comrades-his new family-massacred by the Union soldiers who tricked them into surrendering. That converts him into a bit of unfinished business for the victors, and he must flee deeper into the Western wilderness in order to escape their relentless pursuit...
Killing Skills. One knows the conventions of this sort of thing: how Josey will show himself on every possible occasion to be a man of honor and gallantry, despite his beard and his rough clothes; how his killing skills will always be placed at the disposal of other outcasts and unfortunates he meets along the way; how finally he will dispose of his enemies and, in the end, find a good life similar to the one he was enjoying before evil descended...
...classicism, however, is another man's cliché. It may be that audiences will no longer respond to so familiar a tale and, truth to tell, the trail that Clint Eastwood's Josey follows is a very long one, with a fair amount of dull slogging along the way. On the other hand, the film has its pleasures as well. For example, and not a moment too soon, Josey allies himself with Chief Dan George, playing a wise and humorous old Indian, much the way he did in Little Big Man. Then, too, Eastwood as a director manages...