OVP: Broken Lance (1954)

Film: Broken Lance (1954)
Stars: Spencer Tracy, Robert Wagner, Jean Peters, Richad Widmark, Katy Jurado
Director: Edward Dmytryk
Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Supporting Actress-Katy Jurado, Motion Picture Story*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

We shall continue on our look at the writing categories at the Oscars with Broken Lance.  The Best Motion Picture Story category would disappear in the mid-1950's, but not before it gave a few nominations to some movies that are largely forgotten now, one of which is today's picture.  Broken Lance was a remake of the 1949 film House of Strangers, which starred Edward G. Robinson & Susan Hayward, but in some ways it's more a reimagining of King Lear.  The film features a then-ascendant Robert Wagner, who was in the early throes of movie stardom, and Spencer Tracy, who at the time was at the tail-end of his lucrative years at MGM (this film was a loan to Fox, and Tracy would be an independent player within two years of this movie's release despite at one point being the most valuable man on the lot).  Let's give it a look, shall we?

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Matthew Devereaux (Tracy) and his four sons, three of whom are from his first marriage, including the most prominent of the three Ben (Widmark), and a fourth Joe (Wagner) is from his second marriage to Senora Devereaux (Jurado, and no she doesn't get a real name).  The three brothers from the first marriage are tired of living under their father's tyrannical control, and want access to his money & cattle ranch, particularly to modernize it.  Joe, his favorite, is the only one who still sees his father with respect, and so when his father leads a raid on the mine offices that are poisoning his river & killing his cattle, Joe takes the fall knowing it'll kill his father to be in prison.  While Joe's away, Ben & the brothers begin to out-maneuver & rebel against their father, causing their father to have a fatal stroke.  In the end, Joe, who wants nothing to do with the ranch, is nearly killed by Ben who doesn't believe that his younger brother has no designs on the family fortune, and in the process Ben dies, with Joe thus taking up his father's place, ending the feud within the family.

The movie is heavy-handed, and too short, a complaint I don't often give, especially to movies I didn't particularly like.  The flick glosses past some of the relationship between Joe and the rest of the family-there's too few scenes establishing his animosity with both the brothers and with the community at-large, who view him with suspicion because he is biracial (Jurado, his mother in the film, is Mexican in real-life but is playing a Native American, cause, you know, the 1950's in Hollywood).  They also rush through the cattle raid portion of the film, which is a fatal error in the plotting of the movie as it's so central to the back-half of the picture.  This is a rare case where the one Oscar win that the movie got arguably was in its least successful element.

The movie's other Oscar nomination was for actress Katy Jurado, the only one in her career. Jurado was the rare woman-of-color in the 1950's to have sustained success, and one could make an argument that her nomination here was a "makeup award" for her iconic turn in High Noon (which won her a Golden Globe, but somehow left her out of the Best Supporting Actress race with AMPAS).  Here, though, she does nothing with the role.  The part is basically just there for her to dote on Spencer Tracy, and repeatedly tell him to be easier on his three elder sons.  She's in only a few scenes of the film, and there's nothing there other than long-suffering wife.  The writers don't give her anything to do, and the director doesn't have time to let her establish a stereotypical role.  As a result, this is a wasted nomination on an actress who deserved a better role to be highlighted by the Academy.