According to screenwriter Richard Murphy, Broken Lance (1954) began one day when producer Sol C. Siegel said: "You know, Murph, House of Strangers (1949) never made a dime because it was so dark and 'New York' gloomy. But I'll bet you if we opened it up and did it as a western it'd be wild."

House of Strangers, a now-classic film noir starring Edward G. Robinson as an autocratic father of four sons, had been written by Philip Yordan and based on a 1941 novel by Jerome Weidman. For this western version, Murphy moved the action to Arizona but kept the basic story intact. Matt Devereaux (Spencer Tracy) is a stern cattle baron with three sons from his first wife and a fourth son from his current marriage to a Comanche woman (Katie Jurado). This half-caste son (Robert Wagner) is the object of much resentment from his three half-brothers, who also hate their father. As director Edward Dmytryk later said, "Broken Lance is a story about family, jealousy, the difficulty of change and the harsh beauty of the rural west...The theme that appealed to me is racial hatred, racial distinction."

Dmytryk was a former film editor who had transitioned to directing in the late 1930s and made increasingly successful and important films, culminating in a Best Director Oscar nomination for Crossfire (1947). That same year, he was blacklisted as one of the Hollywood Ten for refusing to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee about his past Communist affiliations. He fled to England, where he directed two films before changing his mind about testifying; he returned to America, served over four months in prison, and now cooperated with the committee, naming names of fellow artists and damaging their careers. Afterward, he resumed his own Hollywood career by directing several pictures for producer Stanley Kramer, including The Caine Mutiny (1954). That film, an enormous critical and commercial success, was still awaiting release when 20th Century Fox signed Dmytryk to direct Broken Lance.

Dmytryk was in awe of his leading man, Spencer Tracy. After rewriting one particular scene that Dmytryk thought had been too "stiffly written," the director showed the new version to Tracy. But Tracy had already memorized the first version and wanted to try it as originally written. Dmytryk agreed and was amazed to watch Tracy make the problematic dialogue sound believable. "He hadn't changed a word in the original speech, but he broke it up and played with it in such a way that it seemed the most natural scene in the world," Dmytryk wrote. "The odd thing was that he felt it was nothing special--that it was just something that every actor owed his art."

For the part of the half-caste son, Spencer Tracy recommended Robert Wagner after seeing him in Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (1953), one of several recent hits for the fast-rising young star. Fox chief Darryl F. Zanuck had envisioned Jeffrey Hunter in the role but agreed to Wagner. Dmytryk was very happy with the result, later writing, "I think it's the best thing [Wagner] has ever done."

In a surprising supporting role, given his stature at the time, Richard Widmark plays the oldest son, Ben. He later said he hadn't wanted to do this film but had been forced to by Zanuck. Widmark had recently refused to sign a new contract with Fox, "because I was tired of being shot from one movie to another--finishing one on a Saturday and starting another on Monday. I could get more money on the outside and get a wider variety of stuff." According to Widmark, this "teed off" Zanuck, who reacted by assigning him to this small part. Dmytryk, aware of all this, later wrote that Widmark "was professional enough to do his job with a minimum amount of griping, and to do it well. Subsequently, I made several films with him."

Playing Spencer Tracy's Comanche wife is Katy Jurado, a Mexican star who had broken through in Hollywood with Budd Boetticher's Bullfighter and the Lady (1951) and shot to greater attention with High Noon (1952). She would receive the sole Academy Award nomination of her career for Broken Lance.

This was a major film for Fox, with roughly a $2 million budget, and was one of the studio's earliest features to be filmed in the wide, anamorphic CinemaScope format. Dmytryk loved his first time working in 'Scope. "I felt the old experimental thrill," he later wrote. "The soft, distant mountains formed a low, broad horizon; men on horseback filled more screen horizontally than vertically; even the squat, spreading architecture of the American West suited the new dimensions perfectly. I was thirty again." Broken Lance filmed on location in southern Arizona as well as on Hollywood soundstages; it was a smooth shoot, finishing fifteen days under schedule and $250,000 under budget.

While not considered a particular classic today, it was well received at the time by audiences and critics. The New York Times deemed it "refreshingly serious" and trade paper Variety called it a "topnotch Western drama. Scenes of breathtaking beauty...are captured by Joe McDonald's [sic] exceptional use of the C'Scope lens. This footage shows a grown-up CinemaScope, a process that has lived up to the promise of the pioneer The Robe (1953)... Wagner does his best work yet [and] Widmark's gift for menace rates a hackle-raising display."

In addition to Jurado's Best Supporting Actress nomination, Broken Lance won the Oscar for Best Story. It was awarded to Philip Yordan, who had written House of Strangers, even though Yordan had nothing directly to do with this film's screenplay. According to Dmytryk, "even Yordan protested" his own win.

By Jeremy Arnold

SOURCES:
Michael Buckley, "Richard Widmark." Films in Review, May 1986
James Curtis, Spencer Tracy
"Director's Cut: Edward Dmytryk on Broken Lance." American Movie Classics Magazine, June 1999
J. D. Marshall, Blueprint on Babylon