Clint Eastwood Says This Western Was the Peak of His Career

Clint Eastwood has made a lot of famous Westerns, but one movie he keeps calling a career high point is The Outlaw Josey Wales. The film came out in 1976, and today it holds a 91% score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Over time it has turned into one of those movies that dads love showing to their kids, while moms sometimes shake their heads at all the violence.

The story takes place during the Civil War. Eastwood plays Josey Wales, a farmer from Missouri who becomes a Bushwhacker after Union soldiers murder his wife and son. On screen, Eastwood is brutal and relentless, but behind the camera, the movie showed how far he had come as a filmmaker.

He had already directed Play Misty for Me, but this one pushed him to another level. Even Orson Welles, never known for holding back, praised him and called him “one of America’s finest directors.”

Looking back at the movie years later, Eastwood himself said it was “certainly one of the high points of my career … in the Western genre of filmmaking.”

But the path to making The Outlaw Josey Wales was messy. Philip Kaufman, the director who would later make The Right Stuff, was originally hired to direct. Kaufman and Eastwood didn’t agree on how the main character should be shown, and Kaufman’s slower way of working drove Eastwood crazy.

Since Eastwood was also producing the film, he had the power to fire Kaufman. Eastwood then took over as director himself. The move caused such a stir that the Directors Guild of America later created the “Eastwood rule,” which stops producers and actors from firing a director and then replacing them.

The story’s origin was controversial too. The book it was based on was written by Asa Earl Carter, a man known for racism and extremist politics. Kaufman once called him “a crude fascist” with strongly anti-government views. Eastwood took the story in another direction, choosing to focus on how war changes men and strips away their humanity.

Some people connected the movie to the Vietnam War, which was happening when it was made, but Eastwood denied making it as a direct commentary.

In a 2001 DVD introduction, he explained, “[The Outlaw Josey Wales is] … a story that needs to be told about the conditions of war on people at that particular time, especially in history, and the dissatisfaction people were having with the war in Vietnam. Not that this was parallel, but just the basic illness of war and what it can cause to people.”

Years later, he told The Wall Street Journal in 2011 that he still saw the movie as a story about the endless cycle of war. “As for Josey Wales, I saw the parallels to the modern day at that time. Everybody gets tired of it, but it never ends. A war is a horrible thing, but it’s also a unifier of countries. . . .”

“Man becomes his most creative during war. Look at the amount of weaponry that was made in four short years of World War II—the amount of ships and guns and tanks and inventions and planes and P-38s and P-51s, and just the urgency and the camaraderie, and the unifying. But that’s kind of a sad statement on mankind, if that’s what it takes.”

In the end, The Outlaw Josey Wales became more than just another tough and violent Western. It turned into a powerful anti-war film that showed how conflict eats away at people. Eastwood proved not only that he could deliver as an actor but also that he was a filmmaker with something to say.

Have something to add? Let us know in the comments!