15 Most Underrated Western Films Of All Time

Charly director Ralph Nelson’s bracing, brutally intense revisionist western from 1970 is one of the genre’s most upsetting endurance tests in terms of its unrelentingly grim violence, but there’s nothing gratuitous about the bloodshed in this one.

Based on the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, one of many appalling slaughters enacted on the native population by settlers in the old west, the film uses this framework to commentate on the then-contemporary Vietnam invasion.

The film is a tough, heavy watch, but its frank and unsparing depiction of violence, along with the clear and repeatedly reaffirmed comparisons to the My Lai massacre, make it no surprise that many scholars consider this one of the bravest mainstream westerns ever made.