Broken Trail
October 3, 2006
Horse Opera, the term has been around for years as a basic way of categorizing two essential components of the western, namely, equines and melodrama. Think about it, do you ever see a western that isn’t, at least a little, a hyper realized dress up dance of old good guy, bad guy formulas that, minus the fat lady and the bass tenor, could be your standard high stakes dramatic operetta? Even something as realistically gritty as “Deadwood” is rooted in the very core of Shakespearian word usage, which itself has a sing-song fluidity not unlike the most complex of tragic arias, so to equate the world of opera to the very different setting of the mid to late 19th century, a time as unrefined as any in America’s brief history, isn’t too much of a stretch, for if any genre of storytelling has the melodramatic guts to rival the far flung life and death epics of the old opera stage, it’s your modern western. As for the first part of the old phrase, the horses, that’s where we come to “Broken Trail”, because if the western is going to be subtitled a “horse” opera, than none in recent memory, or maybe in the famed history of filmed horse operas, has come to rely so heavily, breathlessly, and beautifully on the equine in all their flowing glory, while still utilizing the standard melodramatics of the west to spin a unique tale of survival and friendship in the lawlessness of post war western America. If ever there was a horse opera (forgive the repetition, the phrase is addictive), and not some silly piece of video you might find on You Tube featuring horse puppets singing “The Barber of Seville”, than it’s “Broken Trail”, a made for cable drama recently released on DVD, because when you have a story as compelling for its equine beauty as it is for its respectable characters and dangerous territory, set against the expansion (slow as it may be) of civilization west of the Mississippi and east of the Pacific, than you’ve got the very definition of the western myth as melodramatic realism, or, follow me, very effective horse opera. John Wayne had a wagon full of civilians in the ‘30’s with “Stagecoach”, a heard of cattle in the ‘40’s with “Red River”, and a kidnapped niece in the ‘50’s with “The Searchers”, and wouldn’t he be proud that nearly 30 years after his death we’re still making the west-as-ever-evolving-American-Dream style westerns he thrived in, and if it takes a field full of beautiful mustangs running against blue skies and open pastures to do it, than that’s okay with me, and I’m sure darn okay with “Red River’s” cattle driving Thomas Dunson, and “The Searchers’” wandering nomad Uncle Ethan.
Directed by Walter Hill, who has dirtied his hands with the reconstruction of western start-up establishments before with the pilot episode of “Deadwood”, “Broken Trail” revolves around that most iconic of western archetypes, the land drive, where a handful of dedicated herders march hundreds of cows, or in this case horses, 800 miles to a destination that will pay good money for the stock. The drive that takes up the film’s entire three-hour running time is led by the old time cowboy Prentice “Print” Ritter (Robert Duvall, grizzled and amazing as always), who upon the death of his only sister sets out to find his estranged nephew, Tom Harte (Thomas Hayden Church), to accompany him on an epic cross country horse drive that will properly benefit both, money and family wise, for years to come. But things aren’t as smooth as they should be on this particular drive, for not only is Tom Harte a deeply reserved individual who doesn’t much take to marching orders from an uncle he hasn’t seen in ages, but not two nights into the long journey does a no good horse thief/flesh peddler abandon five innocent, scared Chinese girls sold into prostitution with the men’s camp, and not knowing what to do, or have the heart to set the girls loose on the unforgiving wilderness, the two take the gaggle into their fold as surrogate protectors. This is something John Wayne never had to deal with on his cattle drives, and it makes for a uniqueness that we’ve rarely seen in modern westerns, where your stereotypical hard-nosed, yet sympathetic cowboy not only has to deal with the pressures of shepherding costly horse stock cross country, but with five helpless young girls in tow, girls who know nothing of the culture, let alone the language, of their new, dangerous surroundings. To complete the plot, and drive the bulk of acts two and three (following the painfully sad death of one of the girls from a bug bite infection), the “owner” of the girls, a large, beastly woman named Big Rump Kate (Rusty Schwimmer), who you’d call the female equivalent of “Deadwood’s” Al Swearengen, wants her property rightly delivered to her, and to achieve that goal she sends out a ruthless bounty hunter (Chris Mulkey) to retrieve the lot, at all costs. I guess in this case we do have the fat lady, but she isn’t singing, she’s barking, and it makes for your classic western confrontation, good vs. bad, following a long cross country hunt, with some harrowing action, macho posturing, and a shoot-out that, if not Eastwoodian in it’s ridicule of violence, than at least partially heroic in purpose. It’s all to protect a group of sweet young foreigners who have had a terrible wrong done upon them, and to see the friendships form amongst the two culturally different sets is priceless, and ultimately drives the film’s sentimentality and melodramatic aspects to soften the periodic blows of violence and bitter 19th century brand hatred.
One of the aspects of the story that makes “Broken Trail” such a fine character study, and makes the relationships so endearing, is the almost unforgivable language barrier the abandoned Chinese girls have to face in America, a land that looks upon them as little more than unintelligible slaves. When Print and Tom first save the group from their drunken master, who Tom has to “stretch” with his best wrangling rope, Print, the wise old hand that he is, gently groups the girls and assigns them numerical names one through five, a simple cheat to break that initial barrier that sticks throughout the journey. Likewise, when the girls get to know their heroes better, seeing that they intend them no harm but only salvation, their spirits rise, Print earns the playful nickname “Honkle Pren”, and Tom enjoys the kind, possibly romantic looks of the eldest girl, a beautiful, kindly seamstress played by Gwendoline Yeo, who you’ll recognize as Gabby’s pregnant house keeper on “Desperate Housewives”. Where the epic structure of the horse drive serves both as plot glue and a canvass for some of the most breathtaking outdoors photography seen since “Brokeback Mountain”, the relationship between the abandoned Chinese girls and their hero cowboys is the film’s ultimate heart and soul, and isn’t it sweet, and entirely refreshing, to see the typically macho genre treat it’s embattled female characters with such respect. In a way you can liken it to Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” in it’s vengeance-against-those-who-hurt-women stance, but where Eastwood’s masterpiece was a dark, deliberate, revisionist morality play on the history of violence and hatred in the modern western, “Broken Trail” is simply about decent men doing right unto those who have been wronged, and learning something about their own lives while doing it. It’s a unique situation, handled with care and professionalism from a veteran cast and a director who knows a thing or two about the west, human compassion, and the incredible dramatic beauty of hundreds of stampeding mustangs against a ravishing American landscape.
“Broken Trail” is available on DVD now.
by Adam Suraf