The Outlaw Josey Wales is a grave, dynamite, action-packed anti-war Western. Outlaw follows titular gunslinger Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood) on his shoot-em-up adventures during and after the Civil War. Once a simple farmer, Wales loses his wife and son after a band of redlegs, pro-Union guerilla militants who storm and pillage down south, burned his property and family to ashes. Seeking revenge, he joins a group of Confederate Redleg equivalents, Missouri bushwhackers, who eventually get slaughtered upon a Union-backed surrender. With bounties on his head, all forms of law enforcement on his back, and even his old group’s surviving commander tracking him down, Wales must escape the inevitable and find a proper life worth living – if that’s even achievable after such dire war-driven losses.

Director-star Clint Eastwood is keen to keep viewers on their toes about both history and pain. By angling the Union as the villain, Eastwood immediately reveals an ugly truth about the Civil War: slavery may have ceased, but it took a lot of evil that only fragmented and scattered throughout the U.S. afterward. Here, viewers see simple people get their lives stripped or shaken. Whether abused by crummy bounty hunters or raped by piggish thieves, both Josey and his later companions—personable Lone Watie (Chief Dan George) and shaken young pilgrim Laura Lee (Sondra Locke) amongst others—share a loss of self-dignity and freedom because of those Western inhabitants’ truly wild natures. While the Wild West may have existed before, the Civil War’s end only intensified the WW effects in much less developed farmlands here, controlled largely by essentially Union resistance herders. With most of the film’s perpetrators being Civil War veterans, war’s displacing after-shocks are only further and further ripped open. “I guess we all died a little in that damn war,” Josey proclaims to his commander, solidifying the film’s firm anti-war stance. While a tad on the nose and drearily slow in parts, The Outlaw Josey Wales is fine whiskey when the action shoots and the ideas cluster.

Screens in 35 mm Saturday, 9/14, 11:59 pm @ Somerville Theatre
Part of the ongoing repertory series: Midnight Specials