The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
After avenging his family's brutal murder, Wales is pursued by a pack of soldiers. He prefers to travel alone, but ragtag outcasts are drawn to him - and Wales can't bring himself to leave them unprotected.
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What critics compared The Outlaw Josey Wales to
As Caesar becomes obsessed with taking out the Colonel after a deadly strike against the apes’ camp, the film becomes a riff on classic Clint Eastwood revenge westerns like The Outlaw Josey Wales and Unforgiven.
Most of the spoken dialogue, by contrast, falls to Harrelson’s Colonel, a worthy new adversary who at one point gets a deranged, nihilistic monologue that further underscores his resemblance to Col. Kurtz in “Apocalypse Now.” That’s just one of a few classics that Reeves has cited as overt influences, including the Clint Eastwood western “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” biblical epics like “The Ten Commandments,” and the World War II-era classics “The Great Escape” and “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”
There are scenes that feel straight out of a Clint Eastwood film – look for visual homages to The Outlaw Josey Wales and Unforgiven – and there are no rousing feelgood action-beat moments.
Like the recent Kong: Skull Island , it’s a half-hearted allegory for the Vietnam War, the war that has to stand in for all wars, because it’s the only one that American culture has deigned it okay to hate on; and like Logan , it’s a stealth Western passing itself off in a more marketable genre, with Serkis, the Lon Chaney of mo-cap, playing the graying, gun-slinging Caesar as an obvious, grimacing impression of Clint Eastwood circa The Outlaw Josey Wales .
• For much of the film, Jackman’s Logan sports a full beard and a somewhat dated hairstyle that makes him look like Clint Eastwood circa “Pale Rider” and “The Outlaw Josey Wales.”
After much ado we eventually get on the road, and instead of following typical superhero formulas Logan bites off massive chunks from other movies like Children Of Men, Firestarter, True Grit, The Professional, Terminator 2, Alice In The Cities, The Outlaw Josey Wales, A Perfect World and hell, pretty much the entire cinema of Clint Eastwood until the last-half hour when it becomes a straight-up remake of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) and Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) turned the genre inside out, while international directors like Sergio Leone and Jodorowsky injected the western with new grandness and weirdness and entirely original perspectives.
As it stands, the film directed by Alejandro G. Inarritu, is no more impressive than “The Outlaw Josey Wales” or perhaps “Little Big Man.”
(In the August American Cinematographer, director of photography Ross Emery ticks off a list that includes Clint Eastwood’s “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” William Friedkin’s “The French Connection” and Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai trilogy (1954-56), “Musashi Miyamoto,” “Duel at Ichijoji Temple” and “Duel at Ganryu Island.”
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He’s got his own plans for the evening, none of them good, but can’t stop himself from rescuing these strays and helping them make it through the night, probably because he’s seen The Outlaw Josey Wales just as many times as we have.
Even more remarkable, I read recently that "Gran Torino" is the highest-grossing film Eastwood has ever made, remarkable when you consider he's done things like "The Outlaw Josey Wales," "Unforgiven," "Mystic River," "Letters from Iwo Jima," "Million Dollar Baby," and "The Changeling" to name but a few in addition to the "Dirty Harry" series.
The story is as simple and lean as other Clint classics Unforgiven and The Outlaw Josey Wales, and as polished as the pristine condition Gran Torino Walt lovingly tends to.
His tale is, in essence, the same one Eastwood has been telling for years, a genre meditation on inner and outward hostility that plays like a knowing, seriocomic hybrid of Unforgiven and The Outlaw Josey Wales , with a steady stream of intolerant invectives -- shades of John Ford's The Searchers , with the exaggerated epithet-laced humor at all times coming at Walt's expense -- thrown in for good measure.
Especially since Eastwood had already proven himself as a gifted director with films like "The Outlaw Josey Wales" and "Pale Rider".
So it sometimes just seems to mosey along, exploring highways and byways, not nearly as sprightly as, say, Eastwood's own "The Outlaw Josey Wales."
Despite my personal bias toward Clint Eastwood's "The Outlaw Josey Wales," I can't argue that "Unforgiven," his 1992 Academy Award-winner, isn't among the two or three last great Westerns Hollywood ever produced; and I can't argue that its Blu-ray presentation isn't pretty decent, too.
From time to time, I start to wonder if something else is Clint Eastwood's finest hour as a director - The Outlaw Josey Wales , Bird and Letters from Iwo Jima have all made a run for that title at some point in my estimation - and then I rewatch it, and it's always the same feeling of recognition, the "oh hell no, this is definitely the one" moment of remembering, yes, that's right, this is a fucking brilliant and basically flawless motion picture.
Still, if "Unforgiven" occasionally overstates its case, this is the best work Eastwood has done as a director since "The Outlaw Josey Wales" 16 years ago.
Even though he had directed 15 pictures over a two-decade span (including such attention-getters as The Outlaw Josey Wales and White Hunter Black Heart), it wasn't until he helmed Unforgiven that he moved into the front ranks of modern cinema's finest practitioners.