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Jeff Chandler's cameo as the perishing Cochise parts ways with Daves' Broken Arrow, the truce between the Apaches and the Cavalry depends on the titular scion (Rock Hudson). "He's got it in him to be a greater chief than Cochise, or a worse devil than Geronimo." Peace is a frail thing in an occupied territory, an image early on gives a charred covered wagon surrounded by skewered pioneers. The brother (Rex Reason) chooses war, the Army captain (Gregg Palmer) is an ally, the tribe's relocation forces a new beginning on barren land. An uneasy mediator, Taza exchanges buckskin for a military tunic: "It will easier fit my body than my mind." Douglas Sirk out West, a peerless director of interiors seeking open-air myth and finding an extension of the painful compromises from his suburban portraits. (The pragmatic European eye on unformed America is concurrent with Preminger's River of No Return.) Materialistic rites have deep roots, the gifts offered by the protagonist for the hand of his beloved (Barbara Rush) cannot compete with a wad of cash for buying guns and bullets. "Did you ever see an Apache wedding? Lots of colors, lots of victuals." "No more." Russell Metty's 3-D filming is of rare interest for its multiple visual planes, arrows and stones and torches are duly aimed at the camera but more characteristic is an arrangement of gnarled tree branches across the widescreen with soldiers departing in the dusty background. (The lashing of the maiden by her father is the lashing of the lens.) Hudson's artificially bronzed torso as a spectacle for "White Eyes" suggests curious a foreglimpse of Imitation of Life, and Aldrich's Apache immediately resumes the fight. With Morris Ankrum, Gene Iglesias, Ian MacDonald, Richard H. Cutting, Charles Horvath, Robert Burton, Lance Fuller, and Joe Sawyer.
--- Fernando F. Croce |