Chato's Land

Chato's Land is a 1972 Western Technicolor film directed by Michael Winner, starring Charles Bronson and Jack Palance. In Apache country, the half-native Chato shoots the local sheriff in self-defense, and finds himself hunted by a posse of ex-Confederates, who rape his wife and leave her hogtied in the open as a bait to trap him. After freeing her, Chato uses his superior fieldcraft skills to lure each of the posse to their deaths. The film can be classified in the revisionist Western genre, which was at its height at the time, with a dramatizing of racism and oblique referencing of the Vietnam War. The original screenplay was written by Gerry Wilson. Plot The half-Apache Chato is racially abused in a bar by the sheriff. He shoots the sheriff dead in self-defense and rides out of town on his Paso Fino. Former Confederate Captain Quincey Whitmore dons his uniform and gathers a posse of former Confederate soldiers and sympathizers. Chato, staying one step ahead, fires on the posse from a hilltop, drawing them into a difficult ascent while he descends the other side and scatters their horses. He kills a rattlesnake and wraps the rattle in the snake's skin. Tensions begin to create divisions within the posse. They come across a set of empty wickiups and gleefully burn them.