Chato's Land

Director Michael Winner has always been preoccupied with narratives that reveal the grotesque side of human nature. In "Death Wish," it's the way that trauma begets more trauma. In "The Mechanic," it's the inevitable dissolution of partnerships (due to money, and everything that surrounds it). In his 1972 film "Chato's Land" -- now out on Blu-ray via a limited edition release from Twilight Time -- it's racism that begets all the violence. A group of former confederates are trying to chase a half-Apache man to his death; his sin was self-defense; "I'll ride anywhere to see a dead Injun" was their response. The title character (Charles Bronson, as stonefaced as ever) killed the town sheriff -- the man spoke a number of ugly slurs and then unjustly drew a gun on the innocent Chato. The posse that's chasing him for that crime don't seem too bothered by the death, though. An early sequence has them gathered around dinner, laughing and goofing around, generally enjoying the chance to orchestrate an execution. Winner uses deliberately ugly crash zooms and off-kilter camera whips to film the whole scene. He can do grotesquerie without violence, too.

This is what you'd call a revisionist western -- because for once, it's the white men who are low-down. They follow the lone Chato into the country, where he sets up on top of a mountainside. For a significant portion of the movie, his moral and literal high-ground proves their demise: the group, led by former confederate Captain Quincey Whitmore (an appropriately intimidating Jack Palance,) find themselves picked off one-by-one at the hands of the well-practiced Chato. He keeps his eyelines clean. He runs their horses away from them. He sabotages every space they come to inhabit, and he stays out of their sight while he does it. Chato achieves his vengeance by utilizing the very thing that Whitmore and his men want to deprive him of: the land beneath his feet. It's guerilla warfare.

That's one technique you could compare it to. But you could also say that Chato is eliminating his victims with the precision of the slasher character in a scary movie. "Chato's Land" presents its politics in the form of a genre: the colonialist western is rewritten as a horror film, where the white-southern cowboys are both villains and victims all at once. (Chato even kills them off with increasingly-creative techniques, true to the slasher tradition.) Bronson, a Lithuanian-American who was often cast as Native Americans, may not be the perfect avatar for this specific form of political rage. But Winner's dedication to cruelty and grotesquerie -- his willingness to zoom in on the most egregious elements of American history or human nature -- befits all this horror quite well.

Twilight Time's Blu-ray release of the film features a few of their traditional extras. For starters, there's a booklet featuring an essay by Julie Kirgo, who rightly lauds a number of the character actors who play the more vicious members of Whitmore's gang. Next is an isolated score track (the compositions are by Jerry Fielding), and a theatrical trailer (from the film's original release). The final extra is an interview with screenwriter Gerald Wilson, who speaks about the way he used the script to comment on the Vietnam War, and the way its combat often mirrored conflicts that early European-Americans often created against Native Americans. It seems no coincidence that so many "revisionist westerns" proliferated during this timeframe. When forced to face the traumas of the present, our filmmakers tend to turn to the sins of the past.

"Chato's Land"
Blu-ray
Screenarchives.com
$29.95