The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)

Great pains are taken throughout this mid-70s Clint Eastwood hit (and it was a massive hit, think about that) to assure the audience that the hero of the title is anti-racist and anti-war. And looking back on it now, it’s easy to see why Eastwood, who directed the film, was so careful on that point. Based on a novel by violent KKK member Asa Carter, the movie recasts the Confederates as the good guys and is generally taken to be the type of right-wing propaganda movie that paved the way for Reagan’s victory. Eastwood plays a vigilante who wants revenge on the US government for a war-crime - by Union soldiers - who kill his family in the first scene, and at first glance it adds to a string of 70s Westerns known as thinly disguised condemnations of the Vietnam War: Soldier Blue, Little Big Man, Ulzana’s Raid. It also fits neatly into the post-Watergate suspicion of government, like that decade’s spate of paranoid conspiracy thrillers. But its heart is with the far right of American radicalism.

The film begins in a remarkable hurry; we meet the Wales family just long enough to see them get bumped off. We see the wife a grand total of twice before she is no more, one in a shot of her waving to us from afar, ah, that’s nice, hi to you too honey, the other being molested by a gang of Union soldiers, oh dear. After the credits, the film kicks off with the war over as his army unit accepts an offer of amnesty from the victors. The following scene now looks like an NRA commercial, since it is the primal nightmare of what happens if you go along with a gun amnesty: the surrendering Confederates hand over their pistols and rifles to the representatives of the Federal government and, once unarmed, are promptly massacred in return – only Wales lives on, thanks to a refusal to ever give up his guns to the gub’mint that would make Charlton Heston proud. This is pure Deep South daydream. The soldiers are led down to this amnesty-ambush by their own commander Fletcher, a traitor in a mode that would already be familiar to an audience hearing about FBI snitches in the news at the time.

The only other survivor is a wide-eyed teenager, Jamie, essentially a stand-in for naive hippie idealism, complete with this symbolism: he may escape the ambush but he is still mortally wounded, running but bleeding to death from a bullet-wound. He is the change-the-world teenage youth of the 60s, gunned down by the Feds, because he didn’t understand that his type of rebellion gets you killed; only the hard lone-wolf type of anti-government opposition stays breathing, like the crazy right-wing farmers of today’s America who get into armed showdowns with SWAT teams because they don’t want to pay taxes. Sure enough, the film’s climax is exactly this kind of showdown between decent hard-working farmers who just want to be left alone, and the ruthless US soldiers.

Wales finds a new ally in the bluntly named Lone, a Cherokee. Very specifically a Cherokee. This confuses some audiences thinking of it as a right-wing film: it takes a clearly anti-racist stance in support of the native Americans. In truth, of course, the Cherokee were slave-owners who fought the Union, so there’s no paradox in making the film’s hero a Confederate. The real question is, how does Eastwood square his choice of pro-slavery hero with explicit anti-racism when it comes to the native tribes? The solution is simple – there are no black characters and slavery is never mentioned, except for Wales’ line, “I don’t want nobody belonging to me”, which in its context is not even about slaves.

Meeting Wales reminds Lone who he really is, after years of giving up. They decide to go to Mexico together and live out their lives in peace, but on the way, they have to save a young white woman from rape and sexual slavery at the hands, naturally, of Mexican bandits. Along with her grandmother, they all set up a ranch and live out a militia’s paradise, forging a peace with the local natives out of a shared hatred of the US government, and facing down the government thugs when they come. The political philosophy of the film unravels a bit in a happy ending where Wales and Fletcher, the snitch to the Feds, meet again for the last time and let each other live, with Fletcher giving us the last line - “I guess we all died a little in that damn war” - before Wales rides off, where else, into the sunset, given his freedom by the state after all. None of which changes the experience of having watched a major Hollywood Western with an ideology entirely in keeping with The Turner Diaries.

The author Carter later decided he was half-Cherokee himself, and during the Reagan era he became a New Age guru repudiating his Klan past. I like Eastwood films a lot, but this one, wow-just-wow.