by Brendan Foley
The thing that always set the Western apart as a genre was its elasticity. When you say ‘Western’ to someone, there are certain tropes and visuals and archetypes that automatically fill in for many people, but the actual form encompasses everything from shoot-em-up action to contemplative journeys to neo-noir to flat-out horror. High Noon and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly barely seem to be set on the same planet, and neither exists in territory ever stepped on by John Ford or Howard Hawks. The West, whether we speak of the Old West, the Mythic West, the West of Nightmares or the West of Dreams, can be all things to all people.
Broken Lance, new on Blu-ray from Twilight Time, reveals yet another facet of the landscape: Shakespearean tragedy.
And make no mistake, Broken Lance is Tragedy with a capital-T, the classic tale of a proud man brought to ruin by his own failings. That this tale involves cattle rustling and land disputes and whatnot makes it a uniquely American telling, but the tale itself is as old as time.
Spencer Tracy is the lead of the film, but he’s dead before the opening credits even roll. Matt Devereaux (Tracy) is a hard-ass rancher who went west and managed to beat the odds and build a prosperous ranch. Devereaux brought his wife and three sons with him, but the long climb to prosperity cost him his wife, and his sons were treated as little more than barely-paid and underloved ranch hands. Devereaux remarried, this time to a Native American woman, and had a fourth son by her.
The movie opens with that fourth son, Joe (Robert Wagner), being released from jail for an unspecified crime. Devereaux is dead, and the hostility between Joe and his half-brothers suggests that he considers them at least somewhat culpable for whatever left him behind bars and their father in the ground. The bulk of the film consists of flashbacks to illustrate what went wrong and how a petty land dispute spiraled out of control and caused so much destruction.
It’s a slow burn of a film, not unlike director Edward Dmytryk’s later film, The Young Lions, which I also reviewed. Broken Lance’s melodramatic flourishes and chatty middle sections make it a longer sit than modern film fans may find palatable, and Tracy’s protagonist is such a sour pill of a man that viewers might grow weary of him and his rages long before the running time is up.
But if you stick with the film, the second half of Broken Lance takes a beautifully dark turn as it examines the way the qualities that enabled a man to become successful can go sour and imprison him in a hell of his own making. And as the world comes down around Matt Devereaux’s ears, Tracy rages and rants and rages some more, and it’s electrifying work.
If you listen to You Must Remember This, a podcast about the lives and deaths of Hollywood, you might recall a recent episode focused on Spencer Tracy, and the very specifically Catholic form of guilt and self-punishment that ruled his life. Tracy was a guy consumed with demons and lusts and desires, and the more he caved to them the more he loathed himself and lashed out, which only drove him deeper into the bottle and perpetuated the cycle.
I’m not saying Broken Lance was autobiographically-intended (for starters, it was a remake of an earlier film [like, five years earlier. And we think modern Hollywood is too quick with the rebootquels].) but knowing what we know about Tracy, it’s hard not to see a great deal of honesty in his portrayal of Matt as a man struggling to reconcile with the ripple effects of his choices. Matt’s a man who could never admit an error, and the more he drowns in his own life the harder he thrashes.
Most of the other actors and actresses are at about the period-standard. The only one who makes a genuine impression is Richard Widmark as Ben, the eldest Devereaux boy. It’s Ben that gives voice to all the anger and resentment that Matt’s first three sons have felt for years, and the scene where Ben finally snaps and throws those years of bitterness back into Tracy’s face is heartbreaking and chilling in equal measure. Widmark hangs at the fringes of the movie for the first two-thirds, but in the last act he steps forward and quietly walks away with the film.
Broken Lance touches on a number of common ideas classic to the Western, including racial politics between white people and Native American, the industrialization and fencing off of the West, the growing pains of law and order on a wild land, but most of these ideas are not given enough time to be deeply felt (I would have assumed that this film was inspired by a novel that probably did deal with these ideas in greater turn, but that would appear to not be the case).
No, where Broken Lance succeeds is as an intimate portrait of the way success can curdle the relationships between those closest to us, the dissolution of family in the face of pride and grief and greed. While it does not belong in the category of great Westerns, Broken Lance provides a haunting facet to a genre that too many have been quick to dismiss.