Analysis Of Chato's Land

Although the later British efforts Chato’s Land (dir. Michael Winner, 1972) and Charley One-Eye (dir. Don Chaffey, 1973) fail to discard Western conventions to the same extent as Captain Apache, both of these films reverse traditional racial roles to make it clear that the white man is the villain. In Chato’s Land, a group of white townsfolk embark on a journey to find and kill Chato (Charles Bronson), a renegade Apache, and are incensed when he decides to retaliate by successfully assassinating various members of the posse. Although Native Americans are repeatedly referred to as “savage animals” by the film’s white characters, it is members of the posse who inspire Chato to act, by raping his wife, murdering one of his children, burning a

In keeping with the notion that mainstream film production is commercially rather than artistically driven, it is likely that Native Americans came to be depicted as villainous in order to produce the least amount of controversy and dissatisfaction as possible for majority white audiences. Of course, such portrayals constitute an absurd skewing of the truth, because, as Richard Slotkin acknowledges in Gunfighter Nation, “after 1700 no [Native American] tribe or group of tribes pursued… a general policy of exterminating or removing White settlements”. However, with major Hollywood studios such as United Artists (Stagecoach, Red River) and Warner Bros. (The Searchers) being financially-oriented businesses, maintaining a myth that exonerates white America for its brutality ultimately meant that the classical Western film could be passively consumed and enjoyed by the mass-market without demanding that audiences question their ancestry and the actual founding of the West. After all, to many viewers, classical narrative cinema primarily serves as a method of escapism, allowing them to be temporarily transported into a dimension that lacks the complications and incoherence of