Rent Broken Lance (1954)

Western Classic. - Broken Lance review by Steve

Intelligent western melodrama which relocates Joe Mankiewicz's 1949 noir House of Strangers to the old west, and improves on it. Spencer Tracy plays an ageing pioneer who built up a cattle empire which will soon pass onto his four sons. The most loyal of these is Robert Wagner who is the issue of his marriage to a Native American. The other three sons belonged to his first (Irish) wife who died during the settlement.

The older sons are led by the more procedural Richard Widmark who wants to sell the land for oil and other minerals. But they are motivated by prejudice too. The film dares to allude to the racism of the 'Indian' wars hardening into a legal apartheid.

It's a story of the coming of law to the frontier. There's an audacious scene in a courtroom when Tracy goes on trial for dispensing instant justice. A grandstanding east coast lawyer puts him on trial, not so much for pulling down a copper mine which is poisoning his rivers, but for all the improvised law of the old, wild west.

It is shot on location in Arizona in gorgeous technicolor and cinemascope. This is one of the great westerns, a fascinating film with a brilliant script which presents realistic characters and complex ideas. Spencer Tracy is absolutely credible as the bullheaded, imperious patriarch who is an anachronism in his own lifetime. It's been called King Lear reimagined as a western! Which is tenuous, but gives an impression of its ambition.