Cinema: Hoss Play

The Appaloosa. When two strong men stake their claims to a strumpet and a stallion, the enmity between them can be the stuff that fleshes out the bony structure of the very best westerns. But in this film, a mulish scenario puts a frustrating checkrein on the excitement, and it is slim pickings for Marlon Brando, playing a saddle tramp whose dream is to become a horse breeder, and John Saxon, portraying a Mexican bandit chieftain who has a girl (Anjanette Comer) up for grabs in his lair.

Brando’s prime Appaloosa stallion obviously means more to him than any team of Hollywood scriptwriters ever imagined. In a role that a lesser actor might easily saunter through, Brando handicaps himself with a fiercely concentrated acting style more suitable for great occasions. He seems determined to play not just a man but a whole concept of humanity, and Saxon’s brazen theft of the hoss soon looms as a cause equal in significance to the Magna Carta or the Declaration of Human Rights. Though Saxon ropes Brando, drags him through a stream, and presses his forearm onto a scorpion during an Indian wrestling match, Brando survives to get away with the girl, get on his horse and get off a well-aimed parting shot. All the surprises in Appaloosa are visual ones, achieved by Director Sidney

(The Ipcress File) Furie’s oblique camera work, which teases the eye into viewing dangerously grinning Mexicans and other signs of violence from what seem to be safe, shadowy hiding places in the immediate vicinity. Unhappily, it proves to be a mirage effect that lures an audience on and on, through dusty mesas and vaporous characterizations, toward nothing in particular.