This Sunday, September 29, 2024 at 9 p.m., Arte broadcasts one of Clint Eastwood’s best westerns. A work to discover or rediscover!
At 94 years old, Clint Eastwood is one of the last sacred monsters of American cinema. Revealed in the 1960s by the dollar trilogy by Sergio Leone, father of the spaghetti western, over the decades it has become an icon which has continued to have considerable influence in popular culture. A great fan of the solitary gun-carrying hero, especially at the start of his career, he is – just like John Wayne – an emblematic face of the western. Among his greatest films of the genre, Josey Wales hors-la-loiwhich Arte broadcasts this Sunday September 29, 2024 at 9 p.m.
Josey Wales hors la loi : what is it about?
Second western he directed, after The Man of the High Plains, in which this world star refused to play (1973), Josey Wales hors-la-loi is undoubtedly one of Clint Eastwood’s best films, adapted from The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales of Forrest Carter, a segregationist and member of the Ku Klux Klan. A fact that the filmmaker will only learn much later… The pitch? Josey Wales, a Missouri farmer, sees his family massacred by northern raiders. He then joined the southern ranks. At the end of the Civil War, Wales had not given up his vengeance and refused amnesty. His former comrades in arms, although having capitulated, are massacred on the orders of a Northern officer. Now an outlaw, he heads west to the Comanche reservations.
A great film by Clint Eastwood
Josey Wales hors-la-loi is a very great vintage which confirms the incredible talent of Clint Eastwood behind the camera. At the same time dark, wild and violent, but also tinged with subtlety and humanism, the film brings together all the “Eastwoodian” imagery, so dear to the American filmmaker. True to his character, Clint plays a taciturn and trigger-happy solitary hero, driven by a furious desire for revenge! But Josey Wales also a mark for the beauty of the landscapes, served by breathtaking photography. After all, what would a great western be without its sublime wild panoramas?
