Broken Lance (1954)

Edward Dmytryk Crafts The Western King Lear.

With both it being based on Shakespeare's King Lear and being a Western remake of Joseph L. Mankiewicz's tasty film noir, House of Strangers, Broken Lance had fine sources from which to work from. Throw in to the mixer that it stars Spencer Tracy, Richard Widmark, Katy Jurado, Robert Wagner and Earl Holliman, and that Joseph MacDonald was director Edward Dmytryk's cinematographer of choice, well it's all set up to be a highly accomplished piece.

And it is!

Dmytryk's film tells the story of how the Devereaux family came to implode. Father Matt {Tracy}, is a tough no nonsense pioneer who after finding a copper smelter has polluted his water, illegally raids the copper mine with destructive vengeance. Matt has four sons, his three eldest are a disappointment to him, but his youngest, Joe, from his latest marriage to a Commanche woman {Jurado}, is untainted by his own bitterness. But it's Joe who takes the rap for the copper mine raid and gets sentenced to three years jail. When Joe comes out he finds that his brothers have driven his mother away and all but destroyed the family empire, including his father. Joe {Wagner} has scores to settle, especially with the oldest, and nastiest brother, Ben {Widmark}.

The screenplay comes from Richard Murphy, who, reworked Philip Yordan's House Of Strangers screenplay, bagging Yordan the Best Writing Oscar at the 1955 Academy Awards in the process. And it's not hard to see why. Murphy and Dmytryk have fused together a number of intelligent strands in their picture. Not merely a tale of vengeance that dallies with black sheep of the family like thematics, it also serves up racial prejudice issues, and those of greed and corruption. It's for sure what one would term a talky piece, tho the copper mine raid itself is a pulse raiser, but it's with the talk and how it's put together that makes Broken Lance worthy of its place on any "Adult Western" list. For its court room sequences and a memorable scene involving Tracy and Widmark alone it deserves praise from the genre faithful.

Acting wise there are very few disappointments. Tracy is terrific, as is Widmark, while the youthful Wagner gets away with the obvious problem of him playing a half Indian, by bringing an emotionally honest integrity to the role of Joe. Katy Jurado, who was Oscar nominated for supporting actress, is sweet and showing deft sadness in the thankless role of wife and mother, Señora Devereaux. The itches are with the others, thru no fault of their own really. Both Holliman and Hugh O'Brian as the other two brothers are practically observers in proceedings, both men never really getting to add some weight into the family drama. Jean Peters as Joe's love interest, Barbara, is an important character in the story, yet she's never fully formed. Minor problems aside tho, this is an engrossing and gorgeous picture. So with Leigh Harline's lyrical score complimenting MacDonald's sumptuous Arizona photography {the film was shot in Technicolor CinemaScope and sound mixed in 4-Track Stereo} try and see this on the best system you possibly can, because it's worth it. 8/10

I am not sure that the retrospective elements actually helped this gritty family drama, but the presence of Spencer Tracy adds the kind of gravitas to this film that he usually delivered - and that helps this to stand out from the crowd a little. He is the curmudgeonly rancher with four sons. Three, led by the disgruntled "Ben" (Richard Widmark) are the sons of his now deceased first wife; "Joe" (Robert Wagner) is the son of her successor and is clearly his favourite. It's the late 19th century and so his old style ways are being tested by industrialisation, and it's a problem with a polluting copper mine that causes disruption to his way of life and to that of his sons. His ways of dealing with things are ill-suited to the more legalistic ways that are emerging from the east, and so after a confrontation it looks like things will never be the same for the "Devereaux" ranch again. There are plenty of end-of-an-era westerns about, but most of them don't really work. This one, though perhaps a little dialogue heavy at times, does. It allows Tracy to portray a character that is becoming obsolete in his own lifetime in quite a poignant fashion. He thinks what he has done all his life will benefit his family, but has it - or has he merely alienated them? Widmark isn't at his most convincing, but to be fair we don't get a great deal of context about "Ben" until very near the end; Wagner does just about enough and there are some sensitive, if sparing, performances from Katy Jurado as his Indian mother whose marriage to his father decades ago caused resentment amongst the family and the community. The title does suggest more of an adventure film, and this isn't really that - but it still manages to encapsulate something of the changing ways of life for an hitherto unlikely alliance of natives and pioneers in the face of a new set of ruthless trailblazers with little respect for those who went before.