In 1951, when Broken Arrow hit the Leader Theater on Coney Island Avenue, I was just an undergrown twelve-year-old. I wasn't an assiduous movie-goer because weekends were for basketball and softball, but when I did invest my 14 cents in a matinee, it was for a Western -- not for a soppy musical or scary crime film. Last night, for the first time in 67 years, I watched Broken Arrow again. I imagined that I would remember it clearly.
Hold on, let me be scrupulously honest here. I didn't pretend that I would remember the entirety of the film, not even the plot. I knew only that Sanseearah, the Indian Maiden "Morningstar" as portrayed by Debra Paget, was incised into the deep fabric of my brain. She, Debra that is, might have been my greatest crush or first true love. And why shouldn't she have been? Just direct your admiring gaze to the still above. Miss Paget was young, lovely, exotic as all get out, and yielding. I admit with chagrin that I didn't fully understand what got me so het up about her in 1951, but het up I was.
But all is changed, now, almost three generations later. What was "hot" and romantic then seems more than a little creepy now. Debra Paget (or DebraLee Griffin, of Denver, Colorado) was only sixteen years old when the film was shot. Sixteen! Moreover, she plays younger. In fact, the film devotes several long scenes to Morningstar's puberty rites -- so perhaps she's imagined to be thirteen. (The head dress that she wears in the picture below as well as the rest of the ceremony, was, I am sure, what is now called "fakelore.")
Look at her. The poor dear is barely out of childhood. Mr. Stewart (James Stewart, her graying white mountain-man suitor) was forty-two years old, and looks every bit of it. How can we, how did we, not notice the age difference? Why is he attracted by a child? I tried hard to suspend disbelief, but my powers of suspension are not infinite. The film, I'm sorry to say, teeters into unsavory child-molesting territory.
My pre-adolescent fascination with the film has now been altered, dampened and dispatched.
It's a shame, too, because Broken Arrow was a self-consciously progressive film in which the Apaches were figured not as brutal savages but as human beings. It deserves high praise for its groundbreaking stance. The film was written by the leftist Albert Maltz, of Brooklyn, New York, who was one of the Hollywood Ten, and who, on the day I saw Broken Arrow for the first time, was in jail serving a one-year sentence for refusing to cooperate with the runaway House Un-American Activities Committee.
I therefore wish that the film hadn't been compromised by the March-October love affair. And that Albert Maltz hadn't side-stepped the real difficulties of an interracial marriage in the 1880s by allowing Dear Debra to be murdered.
And while I'm wishing, I wish also that the authorities at Twentieth-Century Fox hadn't insisted that the two most important Apache roles be played not by Apaches but by whites. Debra Paget is the one lead, while Cochise, the Apache chief, was played in redface by Jeff Chandler, formerly Ira Grossel, a graduate of Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, New York. It's not as though more appropriate actors weren't available. In fact, the character of Geronimo, who has one brief speech, was played by an uncredited Jay Silverheels, an accomplished actor of Cayuga and Mohawk heritage.
But would we, in 1951, have been able to empathize with real Apaches, genuine Apaches, rather than with familiar faces in heavy makeup? Or would such Indians have been, even for liberals, too "other," too foreign.
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