Alongside Unforgiven, the grand conclusion, The Outlaw Josey Wales is arguably Eastwood's greatest contribution to the western, the genre he wears across him like a poncho. In fact, alongside the Johns Wayne and Ford, he is the greatest exponent of American folklore on film, but as Josey Wales reveals, he plays the game differently to those classically minded partners. "The Spaghetti Westerns had a very stylish feel to them, and caused some attention and certainly go me started," he explains, "but Josey Wales was the first script I really liked."

He had been startled by Forrest Carter's novel (entitled Gone To Texas) this vengeful tale of a farmer who turns guerrilla fighter after his family is massacred in the sunset of the American Civil War, and commissioned Philip Kaufman to write the script. Kaufman turned in an astonishing piece of work, as much a war movie as a cowboy jaunt, at points starkly real at others romantic even mystical. Kaufman was due to direct, but Eastwood replaced him at the eleventh hour. "It was a difficult time, creatively," he says furtively. Perhaps, he finally knew Josey that much better.

"There was stylishness in it too, you felt anything could happen," he says. Josey is on a journey to rediscover his humanity within the psychotic whirl of his life, but rather than mordant the film is lit-up by a Leone-like humour and a Siegel-like edginess. "It's a picture I'm fond of," allows Eastwood humbly. You won't catch him boasting.

Josey Wales is also celebrated as allegory - a direct reference to the shadowy decline of Vietnam, all but a defeat by 1976. "Well, a lot of people write that," he sighs, never comfortable dwelling on potential 'meanings' in his films. "You should be able to read movies I guess, read into them what you see, and this was made in the Vietnam era. I did see it as allegorical, but it is as much about the Civil War, one of the most bloody and impactful in American history because it pitted American against American." He pauses to regulate his answer: "It was about a man with a disappointment about that." Who could put it any better?

Clint Eastwood On... Kelly's Heroes
(1970, BRIAN G. HUTTON) "That script had a lot of the depth to it, sadly a lot of that was taken out in favour of entertainment." Eastwood's second movie with Brian G. Hutton, after Where Eagles Dare, may also be set in WWII but is a different beast entirely. It's a goofy caper movie in which a squad of American troops, with the oddball energy of the Animal House frat (significantly John Landis was an assistant on set), track down a stash Nazi gold on behalf of themselves. It's the Three Kings of its day, with Eastwood reduced to playing straight man as the likes of Donald Sutherland and Telly Savalas cut loose. Satirical and amoral, it had the spirit of the '70s (MASH was released in the same year) and feels as much a reflection of Vietnam than the war in Europe.

And it was a blast to make. "We were all in Yugoslavia, this bunch of crazy souls: American, British, French, German, Italian and Yugoslav. All those languages being spoken during the production… It was like being back with Sergio."