Broken Arrow
Tags: revenge, historical fiction

Plot synopsis:
Major Vic Deakins (John Travolta) and Captain Riley Hale (Christian Slater), pilots in the United States Air Force, are assigned to a top secret exercise over Utah, flying a B-3 Stealth Bomber (a fictional iteration of the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber) with two B83 nuclear bombs on board. After successfully evading Air Force radar, Deakins attacks Hale and ejects him out of the plane. Deakins then releases the bombs without detonating them and reports that Hale has gone rogue. He then ejects from the plane, leaving it to crash.
A search and rescue team is sent to recover the warheads. They do not find the warheads and report a "Broken Arrow", a situation wherein nuclear weapons are missing. The team later locates the warheads in a canyon but are killed by mercenaries, including Sgt. Kelly (Howie Long), a corrupt member of the team. Deakins arrives moments later and plots his next move with Pritchett (Bob Gunton), the operation's financier. They plan to blackmail the US government with the threat of detonating the warhead in a populated area.
Hale survives the ejection and is found by park ranger Terry Carmichael (Samantha Mathis). He convinces her to help him track down Deakins. After recovering the warheads and escaping to a nearby copper mine, Hale attempts to disable them by intentionally entering the arming code incorrectly. However, as Deakins had rigged the device, Hale's actions instead arm the warhead. He hides the remaining one deep in an abandoned mine.
Deakins' team arrive and secure the unarmed warhead. Deakins then shortens the detonation time and leaves Hale and Terry to die. A NEST team helicopter chases Deakins' team. During the chase, Deakins kills Pritchett after he becomes fed up with the latter's complaints. Hale and Terry escape from the mine via an underground river just before the bomb detonates. The bomb's EMP destroys the NEST helicopter, allowing Deakins to escape. Terry and Hale track him to a motorboat used for transporting the warhead. While trying to steal the boat, Terry is forced to hide onboard while Deakins moves the warhead. Military forces rescue Hale.
Hale deduces that Deakins intends to use a train to transport the warhead. Travelling on helicopter with Colonel Wilkins (Delroy Lindo), Hale infiltrates the train and finds Terry. A gunfight ensues and the helicopter is destroyed; Wilkins and most of Deakins' mercenaries are killed. With his own helicopter sabotaged by Hale and his plan falling apart, Deakins decides to detonate the warhead regardless. Not wanting to die, Kelly holds Deakins at gunpoint and orders him to disarm the weapon. Hale takes advantage of the situation and kicks Kelly out of the train to his death.
Terry detaches the rear section of the train (with the bomb) from the front, but gets into a shootout with the engineer. The latter is shot and falls on the train brakes, causing the train to stop. The detached boxcars continue to coast at high speed. Meanwhile, Deakins, still in possession of a device that can either disarm or detonate the bomb, forces Hale to drop his gun and challenges him to close-quarters combat. Hale eventually overpowers Deakins, acquires the detonator, disarms the warhead, and leaps out of the train. As the detached boxcars slam into the halted front half, the warhead flies into Deakins, and the entire train derails and explodes, incinerating him.
Hale finds Terry and the damaged nuclear warhead. The two formally introduce themselves to each other amidst the wreckage.

Review: But both films had a lasting impact on his career.This is the story of Army Captain Tom Jeffords who with a simple act of kindness started a peace process with the Apaches led by their charismatic leader Cochise.
Howard make a treaty with the Apache, at least most of them.Broken Arrow did a lot for James Stewart, but even more for Jeff Chandler who plays Cochise.
It's those people and what they do break the peace that is the rest of Broken Arrow's story.Delmar Daves is a good director of western films and in fact did another film about the U.S. government trying to make peace with another Indian tribe, the Modocs in Oregon, in the film Drumbeat.
Although the story is entertaining and the performances of James Stewart, Jeff Chandler and Debra Paget outstanding, what makes Broken Arrow a landmark film is its portrayal of the Apache Indians as something more than savage killers.
Here they are seen as people who want what the "white men" wanted: to live in freedom with their families on their own land and to live their lives in their own way.Jeff Chandler is terrific as Apache leader Cochise, who he would play twice more in other films.
Stewart is looked on as a traitor by his friends and things are complicated further by his relationship with the young Apache girl played by Debra Paget.I cannot think of another western in which indians have been portrayed as real people with emotions who hurt, who love.
Delmer Daves offers an important major role to an Indian character, treating him with quality and esteem as human being...Stewart plays a scout who seeks to heal the divisions between the Apaches and white men But while "Broken Arrow" is a perfectly acceptable depiction of frontier struggles, it does not display Stewart to the best advantages Delmer Daves was competent enough, but he lacked the ultimate virility and intensity of Anthony Mann "Broken Arrow" examines, rather intensely and directly, the mistreatment and flagrant exploitation of the Indians by whites in the early West The strength of this often lyrically photographed picture which will a1ways have an honorable place among Westerns lies particularly in the touching dignity of Stewart's love and marriage to an Indian girl (Debra Paget).
Indian haters, of course, stir up the usual sort of trouble and Stewart's bride becomes a victim with all the consequent poignancy for which the film is best rememberedThe over-wise Chandler counsels him that he must learn to live with his whiteness just as his new friends must contend with their own place in the cosmic scheme of things Cochise has words of stark consolation for Stewart: "As I bear the murder of my people, so you will bear the murder of your wife." The most interesting aspect of " Broken Arrow" is not the interracial romance between Stewart and Paget, but Stewart's relationship with Chandler's Cochise There is intra-character complexity here, as Chandler struggles to overcome his disturb of all whites, and Stewart attempts to comprehend the different philosophy and cultural of the Indians Jeff Chandler was quite apt and professional He was so believable in the role of the Apache chief Cochise that he was to essay it again in George Sherman's "The Battle at Apache Pass" in 1952 Chandler's facial bone structure lent itself to noble, incisive Indian profiles, and unlike other Caucasian actors he did not look out of place He was even nominated for Best Supporting Actor at that year's Oscars.
It's the start of a friendship that may just bring and end to the war and peace across the west.Tho not the first "social" Western film made, Broken Arrow, it can be argued, is maybe one of the most important and telling genre films of the 50s.
Showing humanist portrayals of the Apache and dealing out level headed tellings of the relationships between whites and the Native Americans, Delmer Daves' film is as relevant today as it was back on release.
Firstly by convincing Cochise (Jeff Chandler bang on form) to allow the mail run thru the pass, something that brings suspicion and calls of Indian lover from Jeffords' own kind, and then to finally set up a peace pact at a time when violence and hatred was rife in the west.As the friendship between the two men grows, Jeffords and an Apache girl fall in love (beautiful Debra Paget as Sonseeahray), thus giving the story a further jolt of momentum.
...but this was a very fine Western, and I don't even like the Western genre particularly well.James Stewart plays Tom Jeffords, an ex-army soldier, scout, and now someone who is panning for gold in Apache country.
He decides to learn their ways and language from an Apache in town, and sets out on the dangerous mission to meet Cochise, leader of the Apaches, and to try to slowly build peace between the Apache and the Americans, who are trying to settle Arizona after the Civil War - that is if he survives his first encounter with an Apache scouting party, who just might kill him for the sake of the Apache and Americans being at war.I don't know how accurate this film is historically, but there is some fine acting, action, suspense, and even a touching Anglo-Apache romance.
The movie is in the past conditional,because we know the real end of the story and Delmer Daves who had been studying the Indians ways for a long time did not try to fool the audience:"broken arrow" is not a nice "peace and love" movie:there are plenty of death,violence and hatred here ,more than in the average western.As Cochise says,living in peace is more difficult than waging war.But Jeffords and him become legendary figures whom we can still meet today everywhere in the world,peace on earth and good will to men .Thus his story becomes universal.There's a wistful,not to say very sad side:Delmer Daves is like John Lennon singing "imagine" or Neil Young singing "Pocahontas" (I wish I was a trapper/I would give a thousand pelts/To sleep with Pocahontas/And find out how she felt/In the morning in the fields of green/in the home land we've never seen):he does know that all these promises are illusive ,the two protagonists trust each other,but who else can they trust?The dice are loaded from the start.That's why the love scenes are so important and among the most visually astounding we can see in a western.Thanks partly to Debra Paget's breathtaking beauty,the scenes between Jeffords and Sonseearhay climax the movie.They give the audience a taste of a lost paradise "the homeland we've never seen":Jefford's dream only really comes true in these sequences where the lovers are under the "big sky" in communion with nature.Some will complain because everybody speaks English,but Tom's voice-over warns us from the very start.Kevin Costner,who makes his Oscar-winning "dance with wolves" in the early nineties ,owes a good deal to Delmer Daves..
Instead of American-Indians being one-dimensional and bad or stupid, here they are real people and the complexities of the relationship between them and the rest of America is actually considered--a rarity in 1950s Hollywood.The movie begins with Jimmy Stewart playing an ex-scout out West during the latter portion of the 19th century.
James Stewart (Tom Jeffords) is the ex-scout who gets to know Cochise (Jeff Chandler better than in any other film he made).
James Stewart is very effective as a brave former Scout for the Union who used to kill Indians but who now wants the slaughters to stop; he learns their tongue, sends up a smoke signal, and is soon in conference with Cochise himself to allow the U.S. mail-riders safely through Apache terrain...he also finds love with Indian princess Debra Paget, a romance his racist white brothers obviously resent (and at least one Apache soldier as well).
Released in 1950 and directed by Delmer Daves, "Broken Arrow" stars Jimmy Stewart as a former soldier, Tom Jeffords, who saves an Apache teen after ten years of war between settlers and Natives in 1870, Arizona.
Jeff Chandler is stunning as the Apache leader, Cochise, but Debra Paget, only 16 years-old during filming, looks too whitebread to be believable.
The film shows the initiative of Tom Jeffords (James Stewart) to make the peace with the Apaches, it looks to me very innocent the way this problem was treated, and how easy it was to 'convince' an already convinced Cochise of the need of peace.
Decent historical drama, just a bit patronising.The true story of Tom Jeffords (played by James Stewart), who, in the early-1870s, negotiated a peace treaty between the Apache tribe, lead by Coshise (played by Jeff Chandler) and the US government.Interesting from an historical perspective, and also from a purely dramatical perspective.
The novel ' Blood Brother ' is the basic for the film " Broken Arrow." Losesly based on the real life efforts of Tom Jeffords who tried to negotiate peace between White Settlers and Cochise (Jeff Chandler) the Apache.
In addition, While at the Apache camp, Jeffords falls in love with a native girl called Sonseeahray (Debra Paget) and must convince Gen. Oliver Howard (Basil Ruysdael) and Indian hater Ben Slade (Will Geer) to honor the peace.
The two main characters are both real historical individuals, the Apache chief Cochise and Tom Jeffords, a white man who befriended him and played a major role in negotiating the treaty.In the film's opening scene, Jeffords comes upon a wounded Apache boy who has been shot in the back by white settlers.
The second is that the two major Indian characters are played by white actors, Cochise by Jeff Chandler and Sonseeahray, the Apache girl who becomes Jeffords' love interest, by Debra Paget.
Paget, a red-headed WASP, also played Indian characters in other films, such as "White Feather", and in the latter part of her career seemed to specialise in playing exotic roles.Jeff Chandler may not have been an Indian himself, but his own Jewish heritage seems to have made him sympathetic towards another people which, like his own, had often been the target of prejudice and discrimination, and gives a great performance as Cochise.
Okay, you might argue that there was a small pool of good Native Americans to pull from, but even if that's true, why do they pick unconvincing actors to play the main Indian leads, and make them talk in broken sentences?Anyway, there are tough things in many Westerns.
Based on the real-life efforts of Tom Jeffords, this film dramatizes his efforts to make peace with Apache chief Cochise.
After helping a young Indian boy, Cochise sets Jeffords free leading him to think that there may be a way to make peace in the war that has now lasted nearly 10 years.
(James Stewart) is outstanding in his role as former Union captain, Tom Jeffords, to restore peace between white frontiersmen and Cochise's Chiricahua Apaches.
Excellent Delmer Daves western loosely based on the real-life story of Tom Jeffords, whose friendship with Cochise helped end the Indian wars in the Arizona territory.
This kind of realism was fine as long as it did well at the box office, but a few years later, when Elia Kazan approached Zanuck with the idea of making On The Waterfront, DFZ was instead obsessed with CinemaScope and wanted stories with width, not depth, so he turned it down.But in that period from 1945 to 1953, Zanuck made some great movies, and although they may come across as middlebrow today and not daring enough, at the time they made an impact, and Broken Arrow was one of the best..
I have seen this movie many times and many years ago; I can't think of a western that does not try to tell what it was like to love and hate, as well as what relationships were like between natives and others who may have found it hard to understand their ways of life.As for me, being part Apache(Black Indian), I even named my little girl after this movie lady of MorningStar, I call her Sunserae.
The premise of James Stewarts character the war weary Tom Jeffords brokering peace between the settlers and the Apache Indians by befriending their leader Cochise is in many ways the natural predecessor to 'Dances With Wolves' First of all no one has ever and may never better James Stewart when it comes to all round wholesome goodness and he bring it to bear magnificently in this movie.
James Stewart gives another utterly fantastic and enthusiastic performance as Tom Jeffords, a former Army scout who attempted to bring peace between the white settlers and the Apaches, then under the command of a man named Cochise.
Every scene between these two is a little jewel that brightens up our mood when some the movie's uglier elements start to sadden us.Although I do regret that the filmmakers did not, with a few exceptions, cast real-life Native Americans in the roles of the Apaches, I found "Broken Arrow" to be a most commendable Western.
The great James Stewart plays Tom Jeffords who tries to make peace between settlers and Apaches.He becomes a friend with Cochise(Jeff Chandler) and falls in love with an Apache girl Sonseeahray (Debra Paget).Broken Arrow from 1950 is a different western.It's not against Indians like many other western movies.I like that.Jimmy Stewart was the right man for the role of Tom Jeffords.He was such a great actor.Watch Broken Arrow if you want to see a different western with Jimmy Stewart..
James Stewart is better than your average Western hero, Debra Paget is smoking hot; hotter than most of those broken down bar girls featured in most Westerns, and Jeff Chandler has the role of his career as Cochise (a role he was so good at; they featured him TWICE in TWO films about Cochise).
As he makes clear he's been involved in battles with the Apache in the past, but somehow he comes to realize that there has to be a better way, and he sets out to arrange a small gesture that would show that peace was possible - he meets the great Apache chief Cochise (played by Jeff Chandler) and he convinces Cochise not to end the war, but just to let the US Mail through.
In the midst of it all, Jeffords meets a young Apache woman names Sonseeahray (Debra Paget) and falls in love with her, eventually marrying her - an inter-racial marriage that would have been difficult in 1870 when the movie was set, and probably would have still caused angst among some in 1950 when it was made!Stewart and Chandler were both very good in their roles.
The Acting Headlined by James Stewart, Jeff Chandler (Oscar nominated), and Debra Paget is Fine all around with many a Supporters lending Gravitas to the Proceedings (look for Jay Silverheels in a Pre-Tonto role).Almost Perfect Picture with Minor Problems and Inconsistencies and is rightly Considered one of the Best Westerns of All Time..
Note: watch for the "prequel", "The Battle of Apache Pass", filmed two years later with Chandler and Silverheels reprising their roles as Cochise and Geronimo.Here's what I liked:This kicked off a decade of great James Stewart Westerns.
Starring my personal favorite actor Mr. James Stewart and featuring superlative performances from Jeff Chandler & Debra Paget, "Broken Arrow" is a fine Western that transcends the conventional attitude of Native Americans being nothing more than mere savages.
The story is about one brave white American named Tom Jeffords (Stewart), who risks his life by riding into the Apache stronghold led by the natives' champion of truth and honor, Cochise (brilliantly portrayed by Chandler).
It also has a great Technicolor picture, wonderful locations, good performances, a nice romance and well done action scenes.A former soldier Tom Jeffords (James Stewart) decides to become involved in the conflict with the Apache because he has seen enough bloodshed.
Later Jeffords at great personal risk sets up a meeting with the Apache leader Cochise (Jeff Chandler) to see whether steps can me made towards peace.
First of all, this is a groundbreaking film from the early fifties about racial tolerance and peace disguised as a beautifully scenic Technicolor western starring James Stewart, Jeff Chandler and Debra Paget.
It was a dramatization of a true incident in American history when in 1872 Tom Jeffords (played by James Stewart) helped negotiate a peace treaty with Cochise (Jeff Chandler) the Chief of the Chiricahua Apaches.
So striking was he that he played Cochise in two more films.To further the theme of brotherhood, Tom falls in love with and marries a young Apache girl, Sonseeahray, played by a 16 year old Debra Paget, with perfect skin, undeveloped body, and white teeth that blind you when she smiles.
In fact, Jeff Chandler, who played Cochise, is a white sergeant in another film named "Pillars of the Sky" in which he rescues the Indians from the cruelty of his associates.As in "Pillars of the Sky," "Broken Arrow" depicts that the Whites were always the people seeking to negotiate a peace treaty with the Native Americans.
A little bit of quick research reveals that Cochise was fifty five in 1870 when the story took place, making him somewhat older than the real Tom Jeffords, who would have been thirty eight, approximating Jimmy Stewart's age at the time of filming.What's fairly accurate is the role Jeffords played in bringing about a negotiated peace between the U.S. Government and the Chiricahua Apaches in 1872, at least for three short years before the treaty was broken, leading to a decade long hostility that ended with Geronimo's surrender in 1886.
James Stewart gives one of his best performances as Tom Jeffords, the white man who is willing to, and comes to, understand the Apache's way of life.
"Broken Arrow" is also a great romance, with the beautiful Debra Paget as the Native American girl falling in love with Stewart, and vice versa.