ADDITION: Warner 4K UHD (June 2025): Warner has transferred Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales to 4K UHD. We reviewed the Warner Blu-ray back in 2011 HERE. The Warner 4K UHD release delivers a breathtaking visual presentation, sourced from a new 4K scan of the original 35mm camera negative, graded in HDR10 and Dolby Vision for a dynamic, impressive experience. Shot in widescreen Panavision, the film uses expansive landscapes - rugged Utah prairies, shadowed canyons, and dusty riverbeds - to evoke both the freedom and desolation of the West with Bruce Surtees’ (Dirty Harry, Night Moves, Risky Business, Play Misty For Me) signature “twilight” lighting casting long shadows and bathing scenes in earthy hues of ochre, sepia, and muted gold. While the 2160P image can occasionally show a slightly waxy texture and inconsistent grain (likely due to the film stock and lighting conditions), these minor imperfections do little to detract from the immersive experience as the compositions balance raw immediacy with a timeless, almost elegiac beauty that underscores the film’s themes of loss and resilience. The 4K UHD textures are visceral: sweat-stained hats, weathered wooden homesteads, and the coarse weave of homespun clothing ground the film in tactile authenticity, while the scarred, expressive face of Eastwood’s Josey Wales becomes a landscape unto itself. Colors and  contrast are exquisitely balanced (earthy browns, greens, and golden hues are notable), and the image is the definitive for this brilliant western.

It is likely that the monitor you are seeing this review is not an HDR-compatible display (High Dynamic Range) or Dolby Vision, where each pixel can be assigned with a wider and notably granular range of color and light. Our capture software is simulating the HDR (in a uniform manner) for standard monitors. This should make it easier for us to review more 4K UHD titles in the future and give you a decent idea of its attributes on your system. So, our captures may not support the exact same colors (coolness of skin tones, brighter or darker hues, etc.) as the 4K system at your home. The framing, detail, grain texture support, etc. are generally not affected by this simulation representation.

NOTE: We have added 54 more large resolution 4K UHD captures (in lossless PNG format) for DVDBeaver Patrons HERE.

On their 4K UHD, Warner offers a Dolby Atmos TrueHD mix and a 2.0 mono DTS-HD Master audio track (along with a host of foreign language DUBs,) both delivering immersive and authentic soundscapes that export the landscape of The Outlaw Josey Wales that is as lean and evocative as the film’s visuals, prioritizing authenticity and emotional resonance over bombast. The ambience is complemented by Jerry Fielding’s (Escape From Alcatraz, The Gambler, Farewell My Lovely, Straw Dogs, Scorpio, The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, The Killer Elite, The Mechanic, Kolchak: The Night Stalker and The Getaway) understated score. Eastwood’s gravelly drawl and Chief Dan George’s wry cadence carry weight in every exchange, while environmental sounds - the creak of saddle leather, the chirp of crickets, or the sharp crack of gunfire - immerse viewers in the frontier’s harsh reality. The Atmos mix's clarity ensures that every sonic detail - from the rustle of leaves to the distant howl of a coyote - enhances the film’s lived-in atmosphere, making the auditory experience a vital partner to its visual storytelling. Key moments, like the climactic showdown of The Outlaw Josey Wales, use silence as effectively as sound, letting the tension of footsteps or a cocked revolver speak volumes. It sounds pristinely tight in the lossless renderings. The Atmos certainly adds more depth to the viewing experience. Warner offers multiple subtitle options on their Region FREE 4K UHD.

NOTE: For Atmos, many non-compliant systems will recognize it as TrueHD 7.1, but from Wikipedia: "Because of limited bandwidth and lack of processing power, Atmos in home theaters is not a real-time mix rendered the same way as in cinemas. The substream is added to Dolby TrueHD or Dolby Digital Plus. This substream only represents a losslessly encoded fully object-based mix. This substream does not include all 128 objects separated. This is not a matrix-encoded channel, but a spatially-encoded digital channel. Atmos in home theaters can support 24.1.10 channel, but it is not an object-based real-time rendering. Filmmakers need to remix and render the TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus soundtracks with Dolby Media Producer."

The Warner 4K UHD supplemental package is a generous mix of new and archival content, totaling over an hour and a half of material that augments the film’s context. A feature-length audio commentary by critic Richard Schickel (Clint Eastwood: A Biography,) also found on the previous Blu-ray, offers detailed insights into the production and Eastwood’s career, though it includes occasional pauses. Two new featurettes, “An Outlaw and an Anti-Hero” (about 7 minutes) and “The Cinematography of an Outlaw: Crafting Josey Wales” (nearly 8 minutes), explore the film’s antihero archetype and Bruce Surtees’ visual contributions, respectively. Archival featurettes include “Clint Eastwood’s West” (1/2 hour), a comprehensive look at Eastwood’s Western legacy, and “Eastwood in Action” (around 8 minutes), focusing on his on-set dynamism. “Hell Hath No Fury: The Making of The Outlaw Josey Wales” (1/2 hour) provides a detailed behind-the-scenes portrait, while “A Cinematic Legacy – Reinventing the Western” (over 1/4 hour) contextualizes the film within Eastwood’s genre evolution.  

The Outlaw Josey Wales stands as a towering achievement in the Western genre, a revisionist masterpiece that transcends its post-Civil War setting to probe the wounds of a divided nation and the personal toll of violence with Clint Eastwood delivering a performance and directorial vision that are both raw and profoundly human. Unlike the mythic gunslingers of classic Westerns, Wales is no idealized hero; he’s a man burdened by loss, whose lethality (demonstrated in breathless shootouts) is matched by an evolving moral code. The film’s heart lies in Wales’ unlikely formation of a surrogate family, including Lone Watie (Chief Dan George), a wry Cherokee elder whose sardonic humor and cultural displacement mirror Wales’ own alienation; Little Moonlight (Geraldine Keams), a Navajo woman escaping abuse; and a motley crew of settlers, including the spirited Laura Lee (Sondra Locke). By blending gritty realism with a cautious optimism about human resilience, The Outlaw Josey Wales remains a timeless exploration of trauma, community, and the search for peace in a world scarred by violence, its enduring power lying in Eastwood’s ability to make a solitary gunslinger the emblem of a universal longing for home. The Warner 4K UHD release is a triumph, elevating the film’s visual and aural splendor to new heights with a pristine 4K transfer and dynamic Dolby Atmos mix, while the comprehensive extras illuminate its historical and artistic significance. This definitive package is a must-own for Eastwood fans, Western enthusiasts, and cinephiles, ensuring Josey Wales rides on in glorious high definition. Strongly recommended.

Gary Tooze