Editing The Outlaw Josey Wales (section)

==Reception==
===Critical response===
{{Quote box
| quote  ="Eastwood is such a taciturn and action-oriented performer that it's easy to overlook the fact that he directs many of his movies—and many of the best, most intelligent ones. Here, with the moody, gloomily beautiful, photography of Bruce Surtees, he creates a magnificent Western feeling."|width=33%|align=right|source=Roger Ebert<ref>{{cite news | url=https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-outlaw-josey-wales-1976 | author=Ebert, Roger | title=The Outlaw Josey Wales | access-date=October 31, 2022 | archive-date=October 31, 2022 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221031081418/https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-outlaw-josey-wales-1976 | url-status=live }}</ref>}}

Upon release in August 1976, ''The Outlaw Josey Wales'' was widely acclaimed by critics, many of whom saw Eastwood's role as an iconic one, relating it with much of America's ancestral past and the destiny of the nation after the American Civil War.<ref name="McGilligan266">McGilligan (1999), p.266</ref> The film was pre-screened at the [[Sun Valley, Idaho|Sun Valley]] Center for the Arts and Humanities in [[Idaho]] in a six-day conference entitled ''Western Movies: Myths and Images''. Academics such as Bruce Jackson, critics such as [[Jay Cocks]] and [[Arthur Knight (film critic)|Arthur Knight]] and directors such as [[King Vidor]], Henry King, [[William Wyler]], and [[Howard Hawks]] were invited to the screening.<ref name="McGilligan266"/> ''Time'' magazine named the film one of the year's top 10.<ref name="McGilligan267">McGilligan (1999), p.267</ref> [[Roger Ebert]] compared the nature and vulnerability of Eastwood's portrayal of Josey Wales with his "[[Man with No Name]]" character in the [[Dollars Trilogy]] and praised the atmosphere of the film. On ''[[The Merv Griffin Show]]'', [[Orson Welles]] lauded the film, calling Eastwood "one of America's finest directors".

Review aggregator [[Rotten Tomatoes]] retrospectively gave the film a 91% approval rating based on 44 reviews, with an [[weighted arithmetic mean|average score]] of 8/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Recreating the essence of his iconic Man With No Name in a post-Civil War Western, director Clint Eastwood delivered the first of his great revisionist works of the genre."<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/outlaw_josey_wales/|title=The Outlaw Josey Wales|website=Rotten Tomatoes|access-date=November 29, 2022|archive-date=April 30, 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190430131327/https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/outlaw_josey_wales|url-status=live}}</ref> The film received a [[Metacritic]] rating of 69 based on 9 reviews.

===Awards===
''The Outlaw Josey Wales'' was nominated for the [[Academy Award for Best Original Score|Academy Award for Original Music Score]]. In 1996, it was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States [[Library of Congress]] and selected for preservation in the [[National Film Registry]]. It was also one of the few Western films to receive critical and commercial success in the 1970s at a time when the Western was thought to be dying as a major genre in Hollywood.

Clint Eastwood says on the 1999 DVD release that the movie is "certainly one of the high points of my career... in the Western genre of filmmaking".