Director: John Bushelman
Writer: Edward Lakso
Stars: Kent Taylor, Diana Darrin, Jody McCrea, Robert Sampson and Jack Nicholson
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Index: The First Thirty.
Jack Nicholson checked off many genres in his early years. He started in teen exploitation pictures but they shifted from crime through melodrama to hot rod racing. Then it was dark comedy and historical drama—if we could call the 1920s historical in 1960. Here, he acted in a western before finding his way into horror.
The Broken Land apparently ran for seventy minutes but the only versions I can find are a mere sixty minutes long. Clearly something’s gone but I couldn’t tell you what it was. There are too many scenes of padding as it is, with a succession of characters riding here or there or somewhere when the editor could have just taken us there in a snap.
It’s the late 1870s and the frontiers are gone for the most part as law and civilisation take root. The deepest this movie gets, which isn’t particularly deep, is to ask us what law means. The telling speech there is given by a marshal of a tiny town that doesn’t seem large enough to warrant one, so he can explain his mind to his much younger fiancée.
He’s Marshal Jim Cogan, who’s played by the ever-reliable Kent Taylor, and he believes that the law is some sort of gospel truth delivered from on high. “You see, no man really knows right from wrong,” he says. “That’s why laws are invented. I’ve lived by them all my life. It’s the only way I can be sure of myself.”
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If you’re immediately wondering how such a by the book lawman would handle an unjust law, then you’re digging too deep. What we’re given here is a man who has no moral compass so illustrates the old line that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.
Needless to say, he’s the bad guy, even if he wears a badge. His deputy, Ed Flynn, played by the similarly reliable Jody McCrea, son of Joel, apparently hasn’t noticed this during the past year but is starting to cotton on.
Now, if the marshal is the bad guy, who are the good guys? Well, they’re the “insurgents” of the introductory text and there are four of them. It tells us that they don’t belong in the new west, but that’s a cynical take indeed and it’s not the one that the picture follows.
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First we meet Dave Dunson, a cowboy about whom we know absolutely nothing, only that he rides into town and has a natural tendency to play the hero, even with a bit of a temper to him. He’s Robert Sampson and he does a fair job, given that we know little more about him when the film ends as when it begins.
His first encounter in town is with Billy, the simple young man who works at the general store and almost drops some milk churns onto Dunson’s horse when he rides up. Billy’s too simple to be malicious and too naïve to see it in anyone else. This is Gary Sneed’s only role and it’s not a deep one but he does everything that it needs him to do.
Billy is utterly smitten by Mavera, the new girl in town, even though she’s a long way out of his league. She’s played by Diana Darrin and has a lot more class than is needed to wait on tables at Frenchy’s restaurant.
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And that leaves Will Brocious, who’s already locked up in the town jail as Cogan had picked him up the night before. If you hadn’t guessed, he’s Jack Nicholson and, when Mavera brings him food, there’s that patented Nicholson grin on full display. He hasn’t done anything, but his father was a villain and the marshal thinks that the apple can’t fall far from the tree.
Now, you might be wondering how or why these four characters get to be the insurgents that the film warns us against, given that they hardly sound like your typical set of western villains. Well, that’s where our story lies!
It all comes down to a necklace, a new one at the general store. Billy thinks it would look great around Mavera’s neck, so he presents it to her as a surprise. He hasn’t paid for it, but he tells his boss that he will, from his earnings, and nobody in town would disbelieve him.
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Well, except for Marshal Jim Cogan and his black and white take on the law. So Billy gets to join Brocious in jail, as does Dunson, after punching out the marshal when Billy runs and Cogan honest to goodness aims to shoot him in the back. Mavera’s in the middle of it, but is being pressured out of town anyway because she apparently knew Cogan before he wore a badge and he doesn’t want her to talk.
What all that boils down to is that our four insurgents are a lovestruck young simpleton, a lady who knows things, a visiting cowboy who has a habit of being a hero and the son of a bad guy who’s stuck with his name. Given where it will all surely lead, Mavera unlocks their cells and they run for their lives. That’s really just the setup but you can surely write the rest of the script from there yourselves.
What’s good here is the unusual breakdown of characters, given that the good guy is a bad guy and the bad guys are good guys. There’s a decent amount of Arizona landscape, courtesy of Floyd Crosby, father of David, who had won an Oscar as far back as 1931. He shot plenty of films for Roger Corman and AIP, but this isn’t one of them. Arizona film fans, the town isn’t Old Tucson for once; it’s Apacheland.
Unfortunately that’s about it. The acting is fair enough but it’s nobody’s best work, albeit most likely because there wasn’t enough here for any of them to get their teeth into. None of the characters have any depth at all and only Mavera gets to reveal anything new, because you know she’s going to eventually spill what she knows about Cogan.
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Of course, this is a B western, so none of the above is a showstopper. What really ratchets the rating down is that much of the film really constitutes a chase scene but it’s the slowest chase scene I can remember watching. Nobody goes far, nobody goes fast and there are as many random scenes of riding as there used to be in the thirties, merely at a lacklustre pace.
Nicholson gives a decent performance here, with a couple of good monologues that add a little sarcastic humour to proceedings, but he doesn’t have enough to work with and so falls flat in the end like everyone else. We almost cringe at some of his lines, but then we realise that nobody could have delivered them well. It isn’t his fault that they were written so poorly.
At the end of the day, this is the epitome of an OK film. It’s there. It’s entertaining enough. However, there’s no substance whatsoever. It serves as a curiosity for people like me looking at Nicholson’s early work, or perhaps Taylor’s later work, but not a heck of a lot else.
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