This movie is, for long, a very handbook of that special era that was the 70s, when the paradigmatic view of American society, and our entire society, was changing archetypal views to accommodate the old fashion to the news, unsolved, challenges and, over most, to construct an "ad hoc" stereotype...in this way we have the lonely hero, the man who is capable to go up over the own feet when the social constructed roles of humiliation touch his very moral core and, following his superior imperative, finish taken the gun and opening his way with bullets but, over most, with bravery...a pure old fashion way to see the world and what the man must to do in there, the way that America was constructed, by the way....But this man carry with him the guiltiness too, in this case, we don't know how much Apaches he killed but for sure enough to make Valdez take over his old shoulders the vindictive claim never expressed for a silent Indian woman. The old theme: a man, just one man, can carry on over his shoulders the right way and, against all reasonable preview, win, but his struggle always is fight against the shadowed background of his own sins. This pure, ontological view about the man and his constraints, in "Valdez is coming" is mixed with all that construct that arise in 70's....The new theme: racism (Indian, black, Mexicans), contemporary capitalism (the bad guy, a kind of landlord, have a lucrative weapons trade that is ruined for Valdez intervention), feminism (the woman killed his husband because he was a bad person, betray the bad guy because for him she is just an object, ride with Valdez like his equal), and social responsibility (the cause of Valdez is a social cause, the moral legitimation to kill all those people is because that is done in virtue of a superior value, the justice, make flesh in the submissive Indian woman or Mexican good worker). The very final statement, posed in the last 5 minutes of movie, very improbable from a rationale point of view, make sense from the metaphorical view: the three man, the three views of life embodied in the bad guy, El Segundo y Valdez, make clear that everyone take decisions, that decisions carry on effects, and the way that anyone faced that effects make the difference between men...at last, everyone is alone with his conscience and the claims that the other can make about his acts, and the society is just a kind of desolate landscape looking at us with a kind of indifferent acquittance...a very 70s statement, for sure.