The Outlaw Josey Wales

(Clint Eastwood, US 1976, 135 min., 35mm)

Eastwood as Director. During the Civil War, pro-Union militants murder Missouri farmer Josey Wales’s wife and young son. Wales joins a pro-Confederate militia, but at the end of the war, most of his unit is massacred while surrendering. Bent on revenge upon the men responsible for both tragedies, he becomes an outlaw, hunted by both Union militia and bounty hunters looking for the $5,000 reward. On his journey, he collects a ragged band of outcasts that become a surrogate family, but the reckoning must come, and Wales plans to do the reaping.