Cultural Confusion: A Look Back at Delmar Daves's Broken Arrow

Film & History, Vol. XXIII, No's. 1-4, 199357 In Broken Arrow, Jeff Chandler's portrayal of the Apache chief Cochise revitalized Hollywood's stereotype of the noble savage. James Stewart played Tom Jeffords, Cochise's blood brother. Photo courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive. 58 Manchel / Broken Arrow Cultural Confusion: ? Look Back at Delmar Daves 's Broken Arrow Frank Manchel For many people, Hollywood's depiction of Native Americans in the western film genre provides a moral gauge not pnly for the history of our nation but also for the film industry. Nowhere is this more evident than in the movies about the taming of the wilderness, where our modern mythmakers recount the fate of Native Americans, lumped all together, "who stood in the way of our manifest destiny." Central to any revisionist approach is an awareness that the conflicts between Euro-Americans and Native Americans over the settling of the west began during the days of Columbus and not in the 1800s. For more than 400 years, the two vastly different cultures engaged in a violent conflict that was predicated on radically different perceptions of the earth both wanted. As Haffner and Lusitania's The Real West: The Indian Wars points out, Native Americans never conceived of land in terms of ownership. They viewed it as "part of their family." Euro-Americans, on the other hand, "saw the continent as empty; by their perception, there were no cities or towns, no fences—the Indians were just another obstacle to be overcome in obtaining the land." This immense cultural contrast between whites and Indians established a formidable communications gap that still exists. Film scholars take different approaches to the theme of Native Americans in film. Their initial historical research highlighted how Hollywood stereotyped, distorted, misrepresented, and/or patronized the American Indian. Often obscured were the roots of the armed conflict between the two cultures. Almost never did anyone raise the issue of why whites insisted on viewing the west as a wilderness that needed taming, or why it was to the white man's advantage to depict Native Americans as romanticized and fierce opponents who fiercely fought against our mass migration westward. At the end of the sixties, a new generation of interpretative scholars avoided value judgments on the positive or negative depiction of American Indians and downplayed the film industry's historical, cultural, and political distortions. Their approach was to scrutinize the filmmakers responsible for the production of the formulaic conventions that embody the ethics and immorality of mainstream America. (Hollywood's Ideal, 54) Fair enough, but such scholarship sometimes minimizes the possibilities that integration, assimilation, and brotherhood were Euro-American ideas that euphemistically relieved whites of making legitimate concessions to Frank Manchel is Professor of English at the University of Vermont. Recently, he has written about the Buffalo Soldiers for Black Scholar and about Schindler ' s List for the Journal of Modern History. Film & History, Vol. XXIII, No's. 1-4, 199359 Native American desires, rights, and values. This paper examines one film, Broken Arrow, to illustrate the critical differences between perception and reality. It explores the relationship between movies and society in historical context. One useful way to make the comparison is suggested by Pierre Sorlin. He identifies four criteria in selecting a film for historical analysis: "the originality of the film, its relationship to current events, its favourable reception by the public and the fact of its being produced and distributed during a time of crisis. "(19) That is, by taking a commercial film that meets his criteria, one can recognize how it actively tries to influence public opinion at a particular period in history and gauge how it holds up over time. Meeting the Criteria Few westerns illustrate Sorlin' s prerequisites more completely than Twentieth Century-Fox's production, Broken Arrow. Made in 1949 and released a year later, it came during crises both in America and in Hollywood. As the nation struggled with the problems of the cold war, the resurgence of the Red Scare, urban blight, and social injustice, the film industry reeled from the breakup of the studio system, the advent of television, costly labor strikes, divisive...