General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Broken Lance

Broken Lance (Japanese release title 折れた槍) is a 1954 American Western directed by Edward Dmytryk for Twentieth Century-Fox, starring Spencer Tracy as an aging Arizona cattle baron whose household is torn apart by rivalry between his three elder sons and his youngest son, born to his Comanche wife.¹^•² The film is a western reworking of House of Strangers (1949), a film noir written by Philip Yordan from a 1941 novel by Jerome Weidman, and it is often compared to King Lear for its story of a patriarch dividing his estate among resentful children.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Release	September 25, 1954 (US theatrical); 1 hour 36 minutes; Twentieth Century-Fox²
Credits	Director Edward Dmytryk; story Philip Yordan; screenplay Richard Murphy; producer Sol C. Siegel¹
Cast	Spencer Tracy (Matt Devereaux), Robert Wagner (Joe), Jean Peters (Barbara), Richard Widmark (Ben), Katy Jurado (Señora Devereaux)²
Setting	Arizona, 1880s¹^•⁵
Source	Western version of House of Strangers (1949), from Jerome Weidman's 1941 novel³
Reception	86% Tomatometer from 14 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes; 6.9/10 on IMDb from about 4,900 votes; won 1 Academy Award²^•⁵
Format	CinemaScope widescreen, De Luxe color; budget about $2 million⁶^•²^•¹³

Spoilers

Story

The film opens on the day Joe Devereaux is released from prison. The son of cattle baron Matt Devereaux swears vengeance on his three half-brothers, who dispossessed him of his inheritance and drove his father to a fatal stroke; the story then unfolds in flashback, tracing the sibling rivalries that led to Joe's imprisonment.²

In the flashback, Matt Devereaux (Spencer Tracy) is a stern, tough-minded rancher described in the film as "an old tyrant," with three sons from his first wife and a fourth, Joe (Robert Wagner), from his current marriage to a Comanche woman (Katy Jurado).³ The half-brothers resent Joe, and they also hate their father.³ After an altercation between the father and local mine owners, Joe agrees to take the blame while Matt transfers ownership of the ranch to the three elder sons, who then betray him.⁷ The film's themes include the father's demand that his sons follow exactly in his footsteps, and the background racism directed at Matt's wife and son.⁷

From House of Strangers to a Western

According to screenwriter Richard Murphy, the project began when producer Sol C. Siegel told him: "You know, Murph, House of Strangers (1949) never made a dime because it was so dark and 'New York' gloomy. But I'll bet you if we opened it up and did it as a western it'd be wild."³ Murphy moved the action to Arizona but kept the basic story intact.³ Studio head Darryl F. Zanuck worried the adaptation adhered too closely to elements that had made the original a box office disappointment, and proposed the racial divide between the half-brothers as a way to take "the curse off" the downbeat family material.⁶ A scholarly comparison of the two films notes that where House of Strangers carried social criticism, the western version directs that criticism at racism.⁸

The King Lear parallel has been debated. One academic study argues that Joe Devereaux functions as an arguable Cordelia-like figure, but concludes that forcing Broken Lance into a King Lear template "stifles the genre," and that the film was not originally received as a Lear adaptation.⁴

Production

The deal was set in mid-November 1953, with Metro releasing Spencer Tracy to Fox for $250,000 for ten weeks; Tracy directed $40,000 of that sum as a donation to a clinic.⁶ Zanuck committed to the picture on a large scale, with an all-star cast, a $2 million budget, and the full CinemaScope treatment.⁶ Location work took place near the Arizona border town of Nogales, with a company of 130 people, forty steers, and twelve horses; studio work resumed at Fox Hills on March 19, 1954.⁶

Casting. Tracy recommended Robert Wagner for Joe after seeing him in Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (1953); Zanuck had envisioned Jeffrey Hunter in the role but agreed to Wagner, and Dmytryk later called it the best thing Wagner had ever done.³ Dolores Del Rio was originally paired opposite Tracy on a seven-week guarantee, but her visa was held up in Washington pending investigation of her political affiliations, and she was replaced by Katy Jurado, then known internationally for High Noon (1952).⁶ Richard Widmark, who had declined a new Fox contract, was assigned to the film in retaliation and received fourth billing after Tracy, Wagner, and Jean Peters.⁶

The director. Dmytryk was a former film editor who had moved into the first wave of film noir at RKO and earned a Best Director Oscar nomination for Crossfire (1947). That same year he was blacklisted as one of the Hollywood Ten for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee; he later returned, served more than four months in prison, cooperated with the committee, and rebuilt his career with pictures for Stanley Kramer, including The Caine Mutiny (1954), which was still awaiting release when Fox signed him for Broken Lance.³ He later described the film as "a story about family, jealousy, the difficulty of change and the harsh beauty of the rural west," adding that the theme that appealed to him was "racial hatred, racial distinction."³

Reception and context

On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an 86% Tomatometer from 14 reviews and a 62% audience score from more than 1,000 ratings; on IMDb it rates 6.9 out of 10 from about 4,900 votes, and the film won one Academy Award with two wins and one nomination in total.²^•⁵ Critics have singled out Joe MacDonald's CinemaScope cinematography; Time Out praised "strong performances, ably augmented by Joe MacDonald's lovely 'Scope camerawork," while André Bazin wrote that the laborious use of CinemaScope gave the mise-en-scène a rigidity that made for a certain dryness.²

Broken Lance belongs to a group of postwar westerns, alongside Broken Arrow (1950), Apache (1954), and The Searchers (1956), that framed racism toward Native Americans as a significant social problem in the history of the West.⁹ It is also a leading example of the "squaw man" western, a cycle dealing with white men married to Native women and the social prejudice against their children.¹⁰ The film was released in Japan on November 19, 1954 as 折れた槍, and was exhibited in Spanish-speaking markets as Lo que la tierra hereda.¹¹^•¹²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Action and adventure films (individual works) › Westerns before 1980 › Released 1930 to 1960

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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