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Broken Arrow
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Book Presentation:
An insightful history and analysis of the importance Delmer Daves' film Broken Arrow has in the western film genre. It was, for its time, a breakthrough in how Native Americans were depicted in the movies.
The release of Broken Arrowin 1950 represented a turning point in Hollywood’s portrayal of Native Americans. Film scholars have often cited director Delmer Daves’s movie as the first sound film to depict the Native American sympathetically, and it appealed to a postwar ideal of tolerance and racial equality that became prominent in later Westerns. Yet Broken Arrowcertainly has its flaws: the Apache speak English, whites are cast in leading Apache roles, and Apache culture is highly romanticized. Additionally, many scholars agree that the movie lacks the polish of Daves’s later Western 3:10 to Yuma (1957), with its evocative cinematography and psychological undertones.
Despite its inaccuracies and the many artistic liberties it takes, the movie contains powerful political and social statements about Hollywood and its attitude toward Indian/white relations. Author Angela Aleiss breaks down the way Broken Arrow probed these attitudes and influenced a long series of films with Native heroes that followed, marking a transformation in Hollywood’s portrayal of Native Americans.
About the Author:
Angela Aleiss has been writing about Native American images in Hollywood for more than thirty years. She was awarded a postdoctoral research fellowship at UCLA’s Institute of American Cultures / American Indian Studies Center and was a recipient of the Canada-US Fulbright fellowship to study in residence at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Making the White Man’s Indian: Native Americans and Hollywood Movies and Hollywood’s Native Americans: Stories of Identity and Resistance, and she has contributed articles to Indian Country Today, The Hollywood Reporter, and The Los Angeles Times.
Press Reviews:
"Author Angela Aleiss writes about the production of the film and its impact on Hollywood, telling a story that includes everything from the challenges of accurately portraying Native Americans to a fascinating tale of how the film’s screenplay was secretly written by one of the screenwriters banned from the industry during the Red Scare." -- Rick Ellis ― Too Much TV
"A concise break down of fact and fiction in the classic Western Broken Arrow, which widened the door to more balanced depictions of Indigenous people in movies." -- Frederick J. Augustyn Jr. ― Library Journal
"Aleiss’s original research sheds new light on the depiction of Native Americans in Broken Arrow, distinguishing fact from fiction and laying bare the film’s assimilationist ideological agenda." -- John Belton, author of American Cinema / American Culture
See the publisher website: University of New Mexico (UNM) Press
See Broken Arrow (1950) on IMDB ...
> From the same author:
Hollywood's Native Americans (2022)
Stories of Identity and Resistance
Subject: Countries > United States
> On a related topic:
The Films of Delmer Daves (2022)
Visions of Progress in Mid-Twentieth-Century America
Subject: Director > Delmer Daves
The Films of Delmer Daves (2016)
Dir. Matthew Carter and Andrew Patrick Nelson
Subject: Director > Delmer Daves
The Cavalry Trilogy (2024)
Subject: One Film > Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande
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