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The US-Mexican border, ca 1870: Trini (Anjanette Comer) desperately
tries to get away from her boyfriend, the Mexican outlaw leader Chuy (John
Saxon), so much so that she tries to get him into a fight with a drifter
she has never met before, Matteo (Marlon Brando), and then tries to steal
the drifter's horse. The plan fails from start to finish, but to not lose
face, Chuy now has to steal Matteo's horse, an appaloosa, which really
pisses Matteo off, so he goes after Chuy into the hert of Mexico, where
everyone's his enemy. He armwrestles Chuy for the appaloosa - and loses,
and is nearly killed by one of the scorpions Chuy has put at each end of
the armwrestling table to sting the loser. However, Matteo gets away with
the help of Trini, but now he has her in tow, and Chuy is too proud to let
her go, and ultimately it all culminates in a shootout over the woman and
the horse. Guess who wins! A Western that desperately tries to
be meaningful, and over its efforts totally forgets that it only tells a
story that has been told countless times in countless B-Westerns from the
1930's and 40's - in fact, Roy Rogers made quite a few similarly themed
films back then and would have been ideal for Brando's role). And The
Appaloosa is not even particularly good at telling the story:.
Most of the highlights, like the armwrestling or the final shootout, are
rather downplayed and lack the tension scenes like these simply need, the
whole setup (a guy wants his horse back - at any price) somehow lacks the
urgency to really spark audience identification with the hero, and even the usually dependable Marlon Brando's method acting seems a bit tired, as
if he hadn't found any proper access to his character. Of the whole cast,
only John Saxon does a decent job, but then again his role is too
clichéed for an experienced actor like him to fail in the first place. In
all, not really worth your time or money, there were much better
Westerns out there in the mid-1960's.
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