Broken Lance

Matt Devereaux runs a cattle empire in Arizona with an iron hand, and his four sons have learned to fear rather than respect him. The household fractures along lines drawn long before: the eldest sons from an earlier marriage resent their father's second wife, a Native American woman, and the favor he shows her son Joe. When Joe takes the blame for a violent act against a mining operation that is poisoning the family's water, he goes to prison for three years. He returns to find his father dead, the family land divided among his half-brothers, and his mother driven away. The brothers want him gone from the state; Joe wants to know what happened while he was locked up.

Edward Dmytryk directed the film, the ninth of the eighteen features credited to him in chronological order, following The Caine Mutiny and preceding The Left Hand of God. Richard Murphy wrote the screenplay, and Sol C. Siegel produced it for 20th Century Fox. Spencer Tracy plays Matt Devereaux, with Robert Wagner as Joe, Richard Widmark as Ben, Hugh O'Brian as Mike, Katy Jurado as Señora Devereaux and Jean Peters as Barbara. The film runs 96 minutes.

Released in September 1954, Broken Lance drew modest but steady attention: on IMDb it holds a 6.9 rating from roughly 4,700 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.5 from a much smaller group of around 88 voters. Audience response has therefore been favorable without being enthusiastic, and the two scores agree closely.