Broken Arrow (20th Century-Fox, 1950)

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

Last night (Sunday, February 25) my husband Charles and I watched an interesting pair of movies, both Westerns set in the early 1870’s in Arizona and dealing with the clash between white settlers and Apaches over control of the territory. The first film was Broken Arrow, made in 1950 by director Delmer Daves for 20th Century-Fox and starring James Stewart as Tom Jeffords, a former Union Army cavalry officer in the Civil War who in 1870 is living in Arizona as a gold prospector. He encounters the Apache in general and Cochise (Jeff Chandler), the chief of the Chiricahua Apache in particular, and he immediately sets himself up as a negotiator to bring peace between the Apache and the white settlers even though there’s a state of war between the U.S. and the Natives. Jeffords seeks out an older Apache named Nochalo (Chief Yellow Bird) to improve his command of the Apache language and teach him about Apache culture. The film is narrated by James Stewart in first-person and he apologizes for the fact that he’s telling the story as it happened except that the Apache characters will be speaking “our language” instead of theirs, a fascinating acknowledgment of the absurdity that just about everybody in an American movie speaks English regardless of where they’re from or what’s happening in their part of the world. Broken Arrow was based on a 1947 novel called Blood Brother by Elliott Arnold, and from what I’ve read about it on imdb.com and elsewhere Western movies sympathetic to the Native cause seem to have been an unintended casualty of the holy war waged on Hollywood by the Roman Catholic Church in 1934. In the so-called “pre-Code” era between the promulgation of the Motion Picture Production Code in 1930 and its strict enforcement in 1934 there were quite a number of Native-sympathetic Westerns, and while most of them (including the pioneering 1925 film The Vanishing American, made at MGM and starring Richard Dix) were modern-dress stories, in 1932 Tim McCoy made a great film called End of the Trail that presented the conflict between Natives and whites in the Dakotas and was essentially Dances with Wolves 48 years early. (I’ve posted about this quite remarkable film at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2012/02/by-mark-gabrish-conlan-copyright-2012.html.)

Unfortunately, thereafter pro-Native depictions of the American West almost completely disappeared from U.S. films until after World War II, and this one led the way. Broken Arrow was directed by Delmer Daves, a sporadically interesting filmmaker who was at the top of his game here, and it was secretly written by Hollywood 10 member Albert Maltz, though the original writing credit went to a “front,” Michael Blankfort. (The current print restores Maltz’s rightful credit and does so in a visually convincing way that makes it look like he was credited at the time.) Jeffords gets involved in the whites vs. Apache conflict when he rescues a 14-year-old Apache boy dying from buckshot wounds, and when the boy tells him that he was on the journey that would mark his transition to manhood (essentially the Apache version of a bar mitzvah) and his mother will be worrying about him if he doesn’t get home on time, Jeffords is stunned by the realization that Apaches have normal human emotions and aren’t just savage beasts in vaguely human form. Jeffords attracts the ire of the whites, many of whom lost family members to Apache attacks – notably Ben Slade (played by a future blacklistee, actor Will Geer). He and Cochise also unwittingly spark a virtual civil war between the Apaches, as one of the local warriors decides he wants no part of a truce between the Apache and the whites. In one of the film’s big moments, he declares that he’s abandoning his traditional Apache name and calling himself by the insulting name the Mexicans had given him: Geronimo (Jay Silverheels, an actual Native American best known for playing Tonto on the 1950’s TV series The Lone Ranger). Jeffords also falls for a Native woman, Sonseeahray (Debra Paget), and though the casting was criticized at the time because not only was Paget non-Native (a concern even in 1950), she was 25 years younger (though the age difference is acknowledged in the script), it works surprisingly well even though Debra Paget is hardly one of the most illustrious names in movie history. Jeffords and Sonseeahray go through an Apache wedding ceremony once her father gives them the required permission, only Sonseeahray is shot in the back and killed during an ambush started by Ben Slade, who spread a false rumor about Apaches stealing two horses from whites to break the truce and re-start the war.

The white general who negotiates the peace between whites and Apaches is a character who not only existed in real life but is one of my historical heroes: General Oliver Otis Howard (Basil Ruysdael), who was appointed to lead the Freedmen’s Bureau after the Civil War to supervise the integration of the newly freed slaves into American society. Howard fought with Andrew Johnson, the racist pig who took over the U.S. Presidency after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, largely over the broken promise General William Tecumseh Sherman had made that each of the freed slaves would be given “40 acres and a mule.” The historically Black Howard University, alma mater of Thurgood Marshall, Kamala Harris and many other illustrious African-American leaders, was named for him. Broken Arrow is a quite remarkable film in virtually every respect: James Stewart shows the added depth he brought to his performances after serving in combat in World War II (though he’d hinted at it in a few pre-war films, notably Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington), and though he wasn’t Native Jeff Chandler brings both visual and personality credibility to Cochise. (The film was criticized then and since for having the lead Native characters played by white actors, but there are a number of Native people in the supporting cast, including Jay Silverheels, Chris Yellow Bird and J. W. “Iron Eyes” Cody.) I also got the impression that Albert Maltz was deliberately constructing his script as a metaphor for the Cold War, which was at its peak when this film was made. Certainly the mutual incomprehension among both sides in the conflict and the readiness of the most hot-headed partisans among both Apaches and whites to believe the worst about the other mirror what was taking place between the U.S. and the Soviet Union at the time Broken Arrow was filmed, and the willingness of the white characters to denounce Jeffords as a traitor for trying to bring about peace is also very much part of the Cold War Gestalt.