The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)

Chill Phil (0:03)

In a career spanning more than 50 years, Clint Eastwood has played everything from a vigilante cop to a boozy country singer to an over-the-hill astronaut. But when he straps on his pistols and climbs on a horse well, something just feels right with the world.

Clint Eastwood (0:21)

Any man don't want to get killed, better clear on the back.

SPEAKER_3 (0:26)

Clint is the quintessential cowboy. There's very few people that you can put in boots and a hat that the audience buys as a cowboy character.

SPEAKER_4 (0:39)

Clint Eastwood embodies the West, a man of few words, stoic, very tough. He just seemed to have, you know, the thousand-yard stare of a guy who shot too many guys.

It was great to sit in the theater and eat your popcorn watching just selflessly shoot all these bad guys and keep our streets safe.

Chill Phil (0:58)

But Clint Eastwood is more than a Western icon. He became the bridge between two eras. Taking the reins from some of cinema's giants, he stepped behind the camera to create some of the greatest Westerns in movie history.

SPEAKER_5 (1:13)

Clint was a student of John Ford and John Wayne. He took the best of each of those two, and he took that to the next level.

SPEAKER_6 (1:23)

Move a muscle, twitch your feet, and I'll splatter your guts all over the wall.

Chill Phil (1:35)

MUSIC Growing up in the San Francisco Bay area, Clint Eastwood's love of Westerns started early.

Clint Eastwood (1:42)

When I was a kid, I liked Westerns a lot. I grew up watching Gary Cooper and Joel McCray and Randolph Scott. I was very fond of Westerns made by Ford and Hawks and those guys and Anthony Mann.

Chill Phil (1:59)

Having played bit parts and walk-ons for years, Eastwood got his big break as Rowdy Yates on the CBS television series, Rawhide. The part fit him like a well-worn pair of boots.

Clint Eastwood (2:12)

When we did Rawhide, which was the first steady job I ever had as an actor, it seemed like everybody thought I was the natural to be in it for some reason, I guess because I was a sort of a rangy kid hanging around the back lot of Universal. And the secretaries around the lot used to call me Coop, you know, as a nickname. So I guess they thought that they had Gary Cooper corrective shoes on or something like that. And I was looking rather awkward.

Chill Phil (2:41)

In fact, by the time Eastwood began his career in Westerns, Gary Cooper was a memory, and it was the very medium that gave Eastwood his start that put an end to the Golden Age of Westerns.

SPEAKER_8 (2:54)

What killed the Westerns, partly TV Westerns, you know? When I was growing up in the 1950s, every night there was a different Western on television.

SPEAKER_9 (3:01)

During the 60s, if you counted the number of hours of primetime broadcasts that had Western themes and Western shows on it, it would be a hell of a lot.

SPEAKER_8 (3:09)

Raw Hide, Sugarfoot, Gum Smoke, Wagon Train, Cheyenne, you name it.

SPEAKER_9 (3:15)

In a way, that almost makes it a non-event to make a Western motion picture.

SPEAKER_8 (3:21)

When John Wayne made his Westerns, there were hundreds of program of Westerns. By the time the 60s come along, it's gone to a mere trickle. I think there's about 13 or 14 a year being made of the big feature Westerns.

SPEAKER_9 (3:31)

There was also a tradition or an effort in Hollywood during that period to make movies that were so huge, whose canvas was so wide. They became these kind of 28-star spectacles, and they kind of imploded on themselves, and they became like kind of Westerns as Cleopatra, and they were fighting for bottoms in seats.

SPEAKER_8 (3:53)

Pauline Kael, the critic, wrote a famous review saying everyone was saddlesaw, they were bored with the cinematic genre, that the actors were getting too old, and the interest in a John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart film was so high that they could still get on a horse. The whole thing had run out of puff. It needed a revolution.

Chill Phil (4:12)

The revolution came not from Hollywood, but from Europe, where a virtual unknown named Sergio Leone was trying to get his first Western off the ground. Having already been turned down by Henry Fonda, James Coburn, and Charles Bronson, Leone offered the lead role of the man with no name to the rangy kid from Rawhide.

Clint Eastwood (4:31)

They sent the script to my agent, and said, Does Clint want to do an Italian, Spanish, German co-production of a Japanese samurai story into a Western? And I said, Not particularly.