‘The Outlaw Josey Wales’: A Solid Outing for Eastwood

On Sunday the New Beverly Cinema, Beverly Boulevard near La Brea, will present Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven,” along with his 1976 “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” a notable Western in its own right.

In “Josey Wales,” Eastwood stars as a farmer living along the Kansas-Missouri border during the Civil War. He is plowing his fields when his home is burned and his wife and son killed by a band of Northern guerrillas. Inescapably (but not lingeringly) bloody and violent, this handsome film develops masterfully into a full-scale saga of great impact.

Joining a rebel band, Eastwood inadvertently becomes an outlaw with a price on his head, and sets out for Indian territory with Texas as his eventual destination. He thus begins a long odyssey of self-discovery in a postwar world reduced to such utter chaos that it is all but impossible to tell friend from foe until it’s too late.

Eastwood may be playing essentially the invincible, monosyllabic gunfighter he created in Sergio Leone’s Westerns, yet here he becomes the full-dimensioned hero of an epic, a man who tries hard to be a loner and to keep his mind on revenge, but who keeps encountering people who need him. Behind its noisy gunfire, “The Outlaw Josey Wales” is a timeless parable on human nature.

Information: (213) 938-4038.