MOVIE NEWS – Clint Eastwood’s film stands out as an essential revenge story with solid performances and complex characters.

The Outlaw Josey Wales was the fifth film directed by Clint Eastwood and the second in the Western genre. Like High Plains Drifter, it was a critical success and is still recognized today. However, there is a darker story behind Josey Wales than Drifter. This is not so surprising when we look at it today. However, thanks to the sexual violence scene in the first act of Drifter, it may not be easy to watch this Western classic in the 2020s.

But when it comes to Josey Wales, there’s a direct correlation between what’s troubling on screen and the horror behind the film.

Specifically, it is uncomfortable to see Confederate soldiers as heroic and Union men as bloodthirsty and treacherous. Still, it’s unsurprising that this is how the story is framed. Especially when you realize that the source material was written by someone who had a long association with the KKK, that is, the Ku Klux Klan…

What makes Clint Eastwood’s cruel western important?

Partly because it was the first of six collaborations between Eastwood and his old love, Sondra Locke. She played Laura Lee (although, like the subject of Josey Wales, their relationship was murky). This was Eastwood’s last Western as a director for nine years until the charmingly supernatural Pale Rider. The same goes for him as an actor, except for the comedy Bronco Billy and the musical Honkytonk Man.

The film also marked another fantastic role for Will Sampson, who plays Ten Bears, after playing the iconic Chief Bromden in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest the previous year.

Plus, the film was initially supposed to be directed by Philip Kaufman. He wanted to tone down the novel’s anti-government stance. In fact, he went so far as to call the author, Asa Earl Carter, a “crude fascist.” However, Eastwood wanted to stick to the book as best he could and fired Kaufman. Still, most of the script’s construction was overseen not only by Kaufman, but also by Michael Cimino. Cimino had previously directed Eastwood in the 1974 film Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (Cimino also wrote this film). But he is much better known for the overwhelming success of The Deer Hunter in 1978.

Who was Asa Earl Carter, and what did he have to do with the KKK?

In addition to being a generally problematic, racist individual, Asa Earl Carter also wrote speeches. Specifically to the adamantly pro-segregation governor of Alabama, George Wallace. Carter even wrote what became Wallace’s most historically significant speech: “Segregation Now, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever.”

Other problematic aspects of Carter’s personality included running to replace Wallace with a white supremacist program and hosting an anti-segregationist radio show before his writing career.

He also formed a notoriously volatile faction of the Ku Klux Klan called “The Original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy”.

In addition to being a belligerent, loud-mouthed bigot who wasn’t at all afraid to express his hateful views, Carter was also a hypocrite. Why? Because despite his racism and anti-Semitism (the latter was too much even for the white race-hating White Citizens Council), Carter posed as a Cherokee man named Forrest Carter to sell his so-called “autobiographical memoir”, The Education of Little Tree book!

So, if Carter can honestly be credited with anything positive, it’s that even James Frey and A Million Little Pieces don’t seem so morally bankrupt and emotionally manipulative next to him…

Source: The Guardian, Reddit