Taza, Son of Cochise (Universal-International, 1954)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The second film my husband Charles and I watched last night (Sunday, February 25) was Taza, Son of Cochise, made at Universal-International in 1954 and directed by Douglas Sirk from a script by Gerald Drayson Adams (story) and one of Sirk’s favorite writers, George Zuckerman (screenplay). Zuckerman and Sirk would work together again on two of Sirk’s most highly regarded movies, Written on the Wind (1956) and The Tarnished Angels (1957). Taza, Son of Cochise was originally shot in 3-D and there are a number of scenes that showcase that – instances of guns being fired or rocks being heaved at the camera – but after our dismal experience with the 3-D version of Wings of the Hawk I chose to run the film in 2-D. Oddly, even in 2-D Taza, Son of Cochise looked oddly dark for a film in late three-strip Technicolor. One complaint I often have about 3-D films in color is the color gets darker because of the colored glasses needed to get the 3-D effect, and I was a bit surprised to see that was a problem with the 2-D version as well – though even in 2-D there’s an unusual depth of field to the images. Though Taza, Son of Cochise wasn’t directly billed as a sequel to Broken Arrow – they were made by different studios, directors and writers, and Jeff Chandler as Cochise is the only actor who appears as the same character in both – that’s really what it is. It takes place in 1872, two years after Broken Arrow, and Cochise is dying at the start. Douglas Sirk recalled to Jon Halliday in their book-length interview his trepidation at asking Chandler to repeat the role when his character would die just a few minutes into the movie, but he got Chandler’s approval and the film benefits from his haunting, if relatively brief, performance.

Cochise summons his two sons, Taza (Rock Hudson in his second of eight films with Sirk, a director/star collaboration worthy of comparison with John Ford/John Wayne, John Huston/Humphrey Bogart, and more recently Tim Burton/Johnny Depp) and Naiche (Rex Reason), and asks them to pledge to continue the peace treaty he negotiated with the whites at the end of Broken Arrow. Taza is on board with that but Naiche isn’t; he wants the Chiricahua Apache to reunite with Geronimo (Ian MacDonald) and restart the war against the whites. Taza and Naiche are also rivals for the hand of Oona (Barbara Rush), daughter of Grey Eagle (Morris Ankrum), who like Naiche wants to resume the war against the whites and who has promised Oona to whichever of Cochise’s sons gives him the bigger bribe. Taza presents Grey Eagle with various trinkets but Naiche gives him $300 in U.S. currency with which to buy guns and ammunition for the war against the whites. When the white traders try to cheat the Natives out of the guns they had arranged to buy – they tell Naiche and Geronimo that the price has gone up from $25 per gun to $50 – Naiche and Geronimo take the six guns their $300 will pay for and use them to shoot and kill the scumbag traders. Then Naiche and Geronimo lead a raid against the whites, and the local white commander, Captain Burnett (Gregg Palmer), invokes a clause in the original treaty that allows the U.S. to order the Apache off their mountain lands and onto a much smaller and more barren location on the San Carlos Reservation in case the Apache ever broke it. Taza wangles a promise from Captain Burnett that the Apache will at least be supplied with blankets, seed corn and livestock so they can support themselves on the reservation. The supplies duly arrive in covered wagons emblazoned with the initials “U.S. Q.M.D.” (I’m guessing the “Q.M.D.” stood for “Quarter Master’s Department”), but Naiche is more pissed off than ever that the hunter-gatherer Apache are going to be turned into sheepherders and cattle-raisers.

There’s also an attempt to create Taza as a sort of in-between character at home neither among the Natives or the whites, symbolized by the U.S. army uniform he’s given to wear midway through the film as part of his job leading the Apache “reservation police,” credentialed to enforce the law on the reservation, albeit under ultimate white supervision. Taza’s fellow Natives tell him they no longer trust him now that he’s wearing the uniform of the white enemy, and before the final scene Taza takes off the uniform and resumes his Native garb. It all ends in a shoot-out in which Taza and the good Natives take on Naiche and the bad Natives, Naiche is conveniently killed and Taza and Oona can marry at long last. Though the Adams-Zuckerman script for Taza, Son of Cochise is hardly as well crafted as Albert Maltz’s for Broken Arrow, it makes at least some of the same points – and when Naiche defends his breaking the peace treaty by pointing out that whites had broken every other treaty they’d made with Natives, of course I thought, “He’s right, you know.” The acting is also not as good as that in Broken Arrow, though Rock Hudson is actually quite credible in the lead. Sirk complained to Halliday that Hudson really wasn’t a good enough actor to play what he called a “split character,” one torn between various personal desires and social roles (for his film about real-life Korean War hero Dean Hess, Battle Hymn, Sirk wanted Robert Stack but got Hudson), but he’s just fine here, and Halliday was fascinated by Taza’s wardrobe and how economically it symbolized the conflicts in his character. Ian MacDonald is hardly in Jay Silverheels’ league as Geronimo (and not just because MacDonald wasn’t really Native and Silverheels was), and Barbara Rush is about on the same level as Debra Paget for believability as a Native woman. Sirk’s direction is capable enough, and he gets some interesting 3-D effects without overdoing them, but though he was on the whole a better filmmaker than Delmer Daves, Daves’s direction of Broken Arrow has it all over this one (of course, he was working with a better script as well!). Still, Taza, Son of Cochise is an estimable movie, and I was glad that Charles and I watched them back-to-back.