Red Scare
While the context of the script establishes immediately that the intended subject of the film is to show that “Indians are people, too” imagery is used to create a subtext that tells a much more dangerous story. The subtext of the imagery only comes into focus, however, with the knowledge that the screenplay for Broken Arrow was written—without credit—by one of the Hollywood Ten; a group of writers and directors fined, jailed and blacklisted for refusing to cooperate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities as part of the broader issue of McCarthism and the Red Scare. The western was a genre particularly well-suited to creating allegories about oppression of those with communist sympathies because the natural enemies of this genre—“redskins”—made it almost too easy to equate them with the “Reds’ which McCarthy, members of the House Committee and most of America fear so much. This fear that communists in the 1950’s were every bit as bloodthirsty, godless and savage as Indians in the old west is established early on in the film’s most hauntingly artistic scene: a silhouette in color of two white men hanging still alive from a tree set on fire with a flaming arrow while another lies buried up to his head in the sand waiting to be devoured by ants drawn to the mescal coating his face.
Cochise
It was standard fare for Native Americans with important parts in westerns to be played by white actors but usually at least an attempt was made to find a white actor with a dark complexion or perhaps some mixed racial heritage. In the film, Cochise—one of the three or four most legendary “Indians” in the history of the American settling of the west—is played by the very blonde and (like the screenwriter, Albert Maltz) Jewish Jeff Chandler. In and of itself, this would not be particularly significant, but considered within the subtext of the film actually being a story about Americans reaching out not to Apaches but to communists—the choice of Chandler to play Cochise may well be the most striking imagery in the film.
Lynching
The character who is trying to forge not just peace, but genuine understanding, between the white culture and the Apache culture is Tom Jeffords. Prior to his first meeting with Cochise, he spends a month learning their language. He is welcomed with a guarded sense of trust by the Apache leader, but much of the white community never gets over treating him with an elevated sense of suspicion and distrust. Jeffords comes close to losing his life three times in the films. The first time rates barely a close call when he is confronted by Apaches. The last time is when he and his Apache wife and Cochise are led into an ambush by the white son of a rabid anti-Indian businessman. The second time offers the most ironic use of imagery in the film when Jeffords is nearly strung up and lynched on the basis of mere suspicion—lacking all evidence of criminal behavior—by the white people in town. The subtext of this imagery cannot but recall the fact that the film’s screenwriter was fined, jailed and had his career lynched through blacklisting not by Russians or communists, but the white men in Congress supposedly representing the forces of law and order.
Mrs. Jeffords
Jeffords was an actual historical person and the events of the movie are based in fact. One notable exception to the historical accuracy is the marriage of Jeffords to a young Apache woman. In reality, Jeffords never married. The marriage of Jeffords seems to have little dramatic point aside from adding some romance (slightly creepy considering she’s a teenager and he’s a middle-aged man) until the film reaches its end at which point imagery makes things clearer. The climax of the story is the ambush upon Jeffords, his wife and Cochise which has been set up by the Indian-hating landowner introduced earlier. Jeffords is wounded and motionless and Cochise manages to get away safely, leaving just Jeffords’ new bride to face down several white men with rifles armed only with the knife of her husband. In the most shocking image in the film—one that makes the earlier hanging scene almost poetic beautifully in comparison—she is coldly and brutally shot at near point-blank range by a white man with the advantage of standing on a life. The message: even innocents who merely associate with men like Jeffords will suffer the same consequences.
