One of the greatest Westerns of the seventies, "The Outlaw Josey Wales" is not only a compelling revenge tale with plenty of typical Eastwood badassery, but is also a superb character study and offers much food for thought regarding wartime morality and even race relations among other topics. It's just a great story that's very well-told.
Eastwood's work as director here is excellent, although a couple of the action scenes, particularly the opening one, being pretty shoddy and borderline incoherent, but it's tightly-paced and fairly sophisticated visually, with warm, atmospheric photography by Bruce Surtees. Eastwood's handling of the film's tone is particularly notable, especially with something that is so often humorous yet such an intrinsically dark and serious story. There are many scenes with a wonderfully warm, welcoming air, and others that are just plain gruesome and disturbing, but the film never feels like a clash of tonalities. Eastwood also isn't afraid of variety. He'll go for a kinetic edge and make it work at times, but employs a minimalist approach at others.
Of course, outside of the wonderful performances especially from Eastwood and Chief Dan George, the film's main attraction for me is the brilliant screenplay, an all-time great, by the wonderful Philip Kaufman and co-writer Sonia Chernus. It is a remarkably sophisticated treatment of the story's characters, themes, and plot, with a remarkable narrative momentum and some of the best dialogue ever written. Those last lines are so perfect as well. If this were a more popular film surely they would be considered among the iconic last lines in cinema. Hey, at least "are you gonna pull those pistols or whistle Dixie?" has made it into the popular lexicon.
I have no real criticisms to make. Sondra Locke is okay, not horrible as some say. In every other way the film seems pretty great to me. Nearly forgot to mention Jerry Fielding's score, which is just outstanding. A real triumph on the whole, one of the best Westerns of the seventies and if not Eastwood's best Western as director then almost certainly on par with his best work.
