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The radicalized howl to Broken Arrow's amenable murmur, kicking off with bullets hitting a truce flag. (Mann's Devil's Doorway is the great forerunner.) The Apache's fall from defiant brave to "whipped Injun" in the wake of Geronimo's surrender is starkly realized, Massai (Burt Lancaster) is denied a warrior's demise, shackled and sentenced to docility in the reservation. The escape-rebirth is out of a darkened train and into the disorientating bustle of a Midwestern boom town: Fire wagons and trolleys, saloon roistering and automatic pianos, "the wonders of the age" through anxious, darting eyes. To keep fighting versus fitting in—a native outcast's dilemma, also a rogue filmmaker's. Painting in rapid, abrupt strokes, Robert Aldrich locates the angry severity in the liberalism of revisionist Westerns: The wronged hero is a brusque agitator, a terrorist, a one-man uprising who deep down needs a conflict to function. If Massai trades rifles for plows, it's only after sneering at a Cheyenne farmer's domesticated advice ("Some of the white man's ways are hard..."), strangling his jailer with his own manacles, and manhandling his faithful squaw (Jean Peters). His opposite number is not the Apache sellout decked out in military blues (Charles Bronson), but the paleface tracker (John McIntire) who's every bit as obsessed as him. "It takes two to call off a war." The challenges of peace before freedom, the gift of seeds in the desert. The ending may be a studio-imposed compromise yet the showdown in the cornfield strikingly visualizes the balance of despair and hope, wilderness and garden, blood and crops. The most cogent criticism is by Aldrich himself in Ulzana's Raid. With John Dehner, Paul Guilfoyle, Ian MacDonald, Walter Sande, Morris Ankrum, and Monte Blue.
--- Fernando F. Croce |