The Broken Arrow
The broken arrow is the simple, unadorned, singular symbol in the entire film and its meaning is clear: peace. The arrow is a weapon and ritualistically breaking it in two so it is no longer of use unambiguously situates it as a symbol of peace. Aside from that, the symbolism of Broken Arrow is best viewed through a more complex approach to the film’s subtext
Tom Jeffords
Tom Jeffords is a deeply symbolic figure within the film’s subtext as an allegory of the Red Scare of the late 1940’s and 1950’s. Jeffords is the former scout for the military who later decides to go into the heart of Apache country to meet with Cochise and try to work out a peace plan. In this way, Jeffords is the symbolic incarnation of those patriotic men who fought for the United States in World War II and then openly suggested that rather than engaging the Soviet Union as an enemy afterward advocated a policy of peace co-existence with the Soviet Union for which they were soon condemned as traitors to their country in exactly the same way that Jeffords very quickly finds himself under such suspicion of being a traitor that he is nearly lynched by the people of Tucson.
Apaches
Within the thematic subtext in which Broken Arrow is a contemporary political allegory, the enemies of the white Americans in the film can be located as perhaps the most obvious symbol. The Apaches are movie “Indians” and on a number of occasions referred to by an even more egregious and pejorative term: “redskins.” In the era in which the film was made, that same color was used to immediately paint others into figures of a dangerous enemy in a shortened version: “reds.” The symbolic correlation between “redskins” and “reds” is especially easy to make when the leader of the “redskins” is played by a white actor who also just happens to be New York Jew which, in the lingo of the Red Scare, was well-known to be code for a “commie pinko red.”
The Lynch Mob
It is decided very quickly based on rumor, inference, coincidence and suspicion—but absolutely no evidence of criminal wrongdoing—by white patrons inside a Tucson saloon that Jeffords is guilty of being traitor by secretly providing information to Cochise allowing him to launch an attack on an army wagon train when there was no way they could have known the army’s secret. Things quickly spiral out of control in a matter of minutes he is just precious seconds away from a noose being slipped around his neck in a public lynching. The lynch mob is the symbolic stand-in for the House Committee on Un-American Activities lynching Hollywood writers and directors and actors for committing treasonous acts despite absolutely no evidence of any criminal wrongdoing.
Jeffords' Wife
The Apache wife of Jeffords is brutally and cowardly murdered by members of that lynch mob during a planned ambush on Jeffords and Cochise. While the film adheres to facts rather closely otherwise, in reality Jeffords never married at all, much less a Native American woman. So this romance is created entirely for fictionalized dramatic purposes in a way that really contributes the narrative in no substantial way until the very end. It is only at the climax that the reason this invented romance was inserted into the plot: as Jeffords lies helplessly on his back with wounds from several bullets, his young wife—armed with only her husband’s knife—is blown away by a man standing above her on a ledge armed with a rifle. In that moment the reason for her fictional invention is made abundantly clear through symbolism: everyone, no matter how innocent or tangentially related to those figures whose politics has been deemed dangerous during the Red Scare, are going to be subject to any punishment doled out to them. The Hollywood Blacklist which the film’s screenwriter was notably a part of did not just affect the writer himself, but his family as well. In addition, it also drew under immediately suspicion anyone with whom he was friendly, or collaborated or was just seen in his company.
