Plot
The title character is a beautiful horse (a breed, the Appaloosa) of Matt Fletcher (Marlon Brando), a Mexican-American buffalo hunter who returns home only to have his beloved horse stolen by a powerful bandit, Chuy Medina (John Saxon) with the help of the bandit's girlfriend, Trini (Anjanette Comer) in the border town of Ojo Prieto. Trini was sold to Chuy at the age of 15, but has been brutalized and effectively discarded.
Matt begins to hunt down the bandit to recapture the horse, but finds matters more complicated than expected when he meets the girlfriend of the bandit. Fletcher is subjected to torture and humiliation by Chuy and his minions. A later foray into Medina's camp results in a brutal arm wrestling match in a bar between Fletcher and the bandito. Fletcher loses and is stung on the arm by a scorpion. Again left to die, Fletcher is rescued by Trini, who despises her "lover", Chuy, and prefers Fletcher's company. She gets him assistance from a kindly old peasant, which later costs the old man his life. During the violence-laden climax, Fletcher is forced to choose between Trini and his beloved Appaloosa. Matt, realizing that Trini means more to him than the horse, sends out the Appaloosa to draw Chuy's fire. As the bandit prepares to aim for the horse, sunlight glints on his gun barrel, revealing his position. Matt fires and kills him. Matt and Trini then cross the border with the Appaloosa to start a new life.
It was released as Southwest to Sonora in the United Kingdom.
The rifle Brando uses in the beginning is a Sharps Buffalo Rifle.
Read more about this topic: The Appaloosa
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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