The first of director Edward Dmytryk's four oaters, "Broken Lance" draws its title from the clash between Robert Wagner and Richard Widmark, the sons of Spencer Tracy's patriarchal figure, in ad sprawling horse opera about a cattle baron and his offspring. Joe MacDonald's Cinemascope lensing imbues this soap opera with a sprawling sense of dignity, and Dmytryk prefers to use compositions that accentuate real-life settings. Furthermore, Dmytryk was so enamored of the 2:35.1 compositional frame that he rarely cut into the various long shots that appear in this melodrama. No stranger to westerns, MacDonald lensed John Ford's "My Darling Clementine," William A. Wellman's "Yellow Sky" and Dmytryk's "Warlock." For the record, "Broken Lance" is a remake of the 1949 Edward G. Robinson contemporary melodrama "House of Strangers." This frontier yarn benefits from a superb cast and stunning scenery, but the story is hopelessly lame. "Broken Lance" concerns the twilight of the cattle industry because the Richard Murphy screenplay deals with Spencer Tracy's baron after he has made himself into a central figure influential enough to install his own personal choice for governor in the office. The plot deals with a showdown between Tracy's cattle baron and a copper mining outfit's organization. Sadly, "Broken Lance" doesn't boast enough audacious scenes to offset the long stretches of talking among the principals. Nothing surpasses the scene where Wagner pulls another man's gun and blasts a rattler poised to strike in the first part of the film. After this interesting opening, "Broken Lance" degenerates into a loquacious soap opera. Three-fourths of the action occurs in flashback as we follow Wagner after he serves a three-year stretch in prison and comes home to find everything changed with the passage of his father. Spencer Tracy's patriarchal figure Matt Devereaux has four sons. Three of them came from his first wife, while the Robert Wagner character was the product of Matt's third marriage to an Indian (Katy Jurado of "High Noon"). "Broken Lance" appropriates a social consciousness stance because it favors the emergence of Robert Wagner' half-breed adult and how he contends with his racist siblings. Richard Widmark, Hugh O'Brien, and Earl Holliman are cast as Matt's American children that he loathes as much as they hate him. The main crisis occurs when Matt and his sons discover 40 of their cattle have died from drinking from a river contaminated by a copper mine. Altogether, "Broken Lance") isn't very exciting.

One of the more interesting westerns of its era, and pre-dating "Giant", "Hud" and "The Searchers" (three films it resembles) by a number of years, Edward Dmytryk's "Broken Lance" is a Shakespearean western starring Spencer Tracy as a hard-as-nails ranch owner whose mistreatment of his sons proves to have dangerous consequences. There are touches of "King Lear" here, but the film is more fascinating as a political artifact, with its idealised, interracial, inter-ethnic marriages (a white Irish American and a Commanche Native American etc), its treatment of racism, prejudice, envy, and its flashback structure, which hammers home the way in which history, personal and national, always determines the present.The film features actor Spencer Tracy in another of his politically charged roles. Here the polluting of a river which runs through Tracy's land is aligned to the perceived "polluting" of "pure bred" American bloodlines with Native American blood, the polluting of politics with corruption and the polluting of paternal love and responsibility. Dmytryk then folds the hatred of "half breeds" and "faux Americans" onto Tracy's tyrannical hatred of his own, "pure bred" American sons, raising all sorts of issues regarding the genesis of racism, hate and self-hate. Tracy may privilege Native Americans, but how much does his animosity to whites fuel their own racism? After some moments of Greek Tragedy and some moments of melodramatic romance, the film then turns into a revenge plot, a young kid (half white, half native) called Joe setting out to kill his three (white) stepbrothers, whom he blames for the death of his father. While modern viewers will find the film dated in some respects, "Broken Lance" is nevertheless one of the more ambitious westerns of the 1950s, and plays like a sequel to Fred Zinnemann's politically charged, but ultimately dubious "High Noon". Dmytryk often tackled prejudice and abuses of power, most notably in "Crossfire", the first noir to focus on anti-semitism. He was a member of the American Communist party, but cracked under the pressure of McCarthyism. In 1951 he'd appear before the House of Un-American Activities Committee, where he'd name almost thirty former members of various left-wing groups. Dmytryk was imprisoned for several months in the 40s (during the Second Red Scare). Films like "Tender Comrade", which he made in 1943, were used to label him a dissident. "Broken Lance" is a remake of Joseph Mankiewicz's "House of Strangers", but also bares obvious resemblances to Shakespeare's "King Lear", in which a king divides his kingdom between several squabbling sons, to disastrous effect. See Kurosawa's "Ran" for one of the better renditions of "Lear".8/10 – Seen in context, this is one of the better westerns of its era. Worth one viewing.

This is either a rip-off of King Lear or a remake (uncredited) of House Of Strangers depending on which critics/reviews/posters on IMDb you read. Whatever it's a fairly decent western - let's face it, how often do Tracy or Widmark give bad performances - and though we could easily dispense with lightweights Earl Holliman and Hugh O'Brien, the good news is they are given practically nothing to do. Robert Wagner was coming up at the time and had already played against Tracy in The Mountain though neither came out of that one smelling of roses. Jean Peters was still marking time until she became Mrs Howard Hughs so it's left to Katy Jurado - then on a short streak - to take the actress honors. As the Lear figure Tracy is well up to snuff and his ruthless rancher has echoes of Duke Wayne in Red River, i.e. you steal my cattle, you hang, simple as that. Widmark is under-used but still effective as the eldest son and usurper in chief. E.G. Marshall and Carl Benton Reid weigh in with solid support and it's a fine effort all round.

This film had quite the stellar cast. Spencer Tracy plays the patriarch of his family. The sons are played by Robert Wagner, Richard Widmark, Hugh O'Brian and Earl Holliman. While the actors playing the sons are pretty impressive, as I watched the film I thought that the casting was odd. The bottom line is that Robert Wagner was just way too pretty to be playing the toughest of the four sons. Seeing him in a western was difficult enough to believe and I think he is a fine actor--just outside his range here. I really don't know why Twentieth-Century Fox cast him in the role. Now I am not saying he was bad--he just didn't look the part and seemed better suited to romantic roles.The film is a remake of the wonderful Edward G. Robinson film "House of Strangers"--which itself seems to be a retelling of the story of Joseph and his brothers from the book of Genesis. Both films are about a very controlling, stubborn and sometimes cruel patriarch who bullies his sons. Here, Spencer Tracy is a cattle baron who is one of the most powerful men in the state. While the viewer naturally dislikes him (he plays a jerk who treats his sons with contempt) in the essential struggle in the film, he is in the right...for once. Apparently he has sold some mining rights on his property BUT when the miners use arsenic to mine for gold (a common but insanely deadly practice in the 19th century) it kills off some of Tracy's cattle. The miners don't seem to care so Tracy takes the law into his own hands--after all HE is always right.Eventually, Tracy's actions land him in court and it looks pretty bad for him. After all, you can't shoot at people, beat people up or threaten to hang people whenever you like! His most loyal son, Wagner, decides the best thing to do to help is to perjure himself on the witness stand. However, the other brothers obviously hate their father and Wagner is only their half-brother, so they refuse to perjure themselves as well--leaving Wagner to go to prison and Tracy to lose his case. The bottom line is that the three sons were just waiting to see Tracy fall--like sharks waiting around as another shark got sick and showed weakness.Overall, a wonderful story. It's gritty, well-acted and involving. The only problem is that although it's all very good, the original story was perhaps even better--plus it was original. Because of this, the film needs to lose a point. It's well worth seeing but I say first see the original.