The Outlaw Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood, 1976): The Outlaw Josey Wales is not a movie that wastes a lot of time on preliminaries. We get introduced to Josey Wales the Missouri farmer for all of about 15 seconds before suddenly there's screaming and burning and his wife is getting raped and murdered along with Josey's young son. That's all over pretty quickly until we cut to Josey amid the smoldering rubble of his house. He reaches into the ash, and pulls out . . . his revolver. I think you know where this story's heading.

The War for the Confederate States is in full swing. The guys who attacked Josey's family were Blue Coats, or actually "Red Legs", a murderous Union outfit under the command of the evil Senator Lane. Josey jumps at the opportunity to join up with a rogue bunch of rebels who are riding to the front lines to kill Unionists wherever they can find them. This is during opening credit sequence. By the time the credits are over, so is the war.

Now, under promise of amnesty, all of the men surrender to the Blue Coats so they can swear allegiance to the Union. All except Josey, that is. Good thing, too, because as the men are taking the oath, a Gatling gun emerges from a wagon and . . . let's just say it's sort of a hand-cranked St. Valentine's Day massacre, and it ain't pretty.

Now Josey's the last rebel in the area--hunted by the men who murdered his family all those years (months? weeks?) ago. He heads for safety in Indian territory where he hooks up with a wry, aging Cherokee--played by Chief Dan George--who's been fighting his own personal war with the U.S. government. In his own way, the Chief is as tenacious a rebel as Josey, although somewhat lacking in means ("I didn't surrender, but they took my horse and made him surrender"). The two pair up, and ride on, as outlaws in westerns tend to do.

It's around this point in the story that Josey finds himself becoming an unlikely hero. He rescues doe-eyed, toe-headed Sandra Locke and her mother from a bunch of Comancheros (that's Spanish for "Unwashed Guys with Bad Teeth"), and escorts them to their homestead where he has to protect them from a Comanche warlord by the name of Ten Bears. How he does that protecting is kind of unexpected, and is one of the greatest scenes in the movie. I won't ruin it for you.

Meanwhile, he's still got a posse on his tail ("Not a hard man to track . . . leaves dead men wherever he goes") and bounty hunters around every corner. This is the movie where a bounty prospector readies his attack by telling Josey "A man has to do something these days to earn a living," to which Josey deadpans "Dyin' ain't much of a living."

If you've got a girlfriend or nephew who isn't too sure about westerns, this is a good one to start 'em on. It's got good squinting, spitting, shooting action, but also a lot of great one-liners and plenty of humanistic live-in-peace sorts of themes for the sensitive types out there. Clint Eastwood has directed 4 westerns--we reviewed one, High Plains Drifter previously. Maybe I'll hit Unforgiven next week. Ten points if you can name the forth one . . . nah, never mind, too easy: Pale Rider. But The Outlaw Josey Wales may just be the most entertaining of the bunch. Oh, and there's a DVD out there somewhere that I hear is terrific. This is a picture worth seeing on wide screen.