The real history of the Indian fight with the white in US is an issue to study. Hollywood always showed the Indians as the bad boys, I am saying here what has been also asserted by other actors like Marlon Brando and Jack Palance, and I agree with them. Now, this film seems different, but not so deep, it goes shallowly into the problem, but it is a film different from others touching the Indian problem. Cochise was in fact a good politic and not only a fighter, he understood well that the end of the war with whites would have been the extermination of the Apaches, and for that reason he decided to make the peace with the white. Was the peace reasonable and fair for the Indians? I do not think so. In this film it is shown that the Government of US was only giving a territory of 50 square miles to the Apaches, a misery compared to what they had before the colonization. In addition, Geronimo is here shown as a criminal and somebody hating the whites, again I do not think this Apache boss was like that. Every person is a product of the environment where he lives, faced problems, etc. So showing the hard-fighting Geronimo as the bad boy is not fair with the history. 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. I know that the screenplay of this film was made by the writer Albert Maltz, whom I personally respect because of his work and novels, but the film did not go deep into the problems, showing to what extent the whites were responsible for this war with the Apaches. May be Hollywood can remake this film with more historic and fair information about the Indians in the coming future.
Review of Broken Arrow
