Common Sense Note
Parents need to know that much of the plot concerns prostitution and sexual slavery as a business. Besides talk of venereal disease, there are some bosom-bulging tight corsets and brief nudity glimpsed in a group of young Chinese women as they are being inspected by a seedy client. It is never made glamorous, though. Neither is the depiction of life in the old West. It's shown as rough and often violent -- where a lame horse is summarily shot in the head, not taken to a vet.
Families can talk about the authenticity of the old West setting. As opposed to more lighthearted "oaters" like old-time singing-cowboy movies, The Wild, Wild West or Jackie Chan in Shanghai Noon, there is mud and dirt on this trail, a horse that develops leg trouble is shot to death, and when gun battles begin the Chinese characters duck and cover -- rather than bust out into kung fu. Do your kids prefer this vision of the West, or Hollywood's standard fantasies? While this is one Western that gives due credit to the large numbers of Chinese settlers in pioneer America, you might mention that blacks (not very visible here) also comprised up to a quarter of all working cowboys. One of the girls in this movie is subjected to the practice of footbinding, which could open up discussions about the devaluation and exploitation of women across cultures.
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Charles Cassady, Jr.
BROKEN TRAIL, a prestige made-for-cable-TV Western miniseries, sheds part of the spotlight on the little-regarded presence of Chinese immigrants in the American West of pioneer days. Usually in sagebrush fare this minority group is only shown -- if at all -- as anonymous masses of railroad laborers or laundry-works operators. One notable exception: the family cook Hop Sing, in the vintage Gunsmoke TV show.
But Broken Trail begins with even rougher stuff than yesterday's viewers ever saw on the Ponderosa, a group of Chinese girls -- most semi-nude -- being sold (with their own families' complicity) to a corrupt white man, who is then supposed to deliver them to a house of prostitution in a lawless Idaho boomtown. Meanwhile, Prentice Ritter (Robert Duvall) reunites with his long-estranged nephew Tom (Thomas Haden Church) in a more benign business deal, to take a herd of horses overland to sell. On the way they cross paths with the wagonload of girls and their drunken guardian (who by now has sexually misused one of his charges).
When the man robs the Ritters, Tom tracks him down and simply hangs him, no sheriff or trial. But the act of frontier justice leaves the men with the five frightened/despairing women, whom Prentice promises to protect. Since he can't pronounce or even figure out their names, he just numbers them, One through Five.
During their long overland trek, woman Number Three dies of fever, while another is a casualty of a stampede. But in their journey through Idaho, the Ritters gather a few additional wayfarers, including a fiddle-player descended from an aristocratic East-coast household, and an English-speaking Chinese man they hire as a translator for the girls. He explains the tall tales and lies about golden mountains and rivers of diamonds that lured many desperate, poverty-wracked Asians across the Pacific to America.
The last person to join their entourage is another abused woman, this time a wife-turned-prostitute named Nola (Greta Scacchi). In quite the it's-a-small-West-after-all coincidence, Nola is fleeing from the same brothel the Chinese girls were destined for, and her murderous outlaw ex-lover is in pursuit with his gang.
Director Walter Hill is one of the few 21st-century filmmakers who has made the old West a career specialty. He takes the milieu seriously, seldom sugar-coating or sentimentalizing the bitterness of life on the trail, in contrast with unrealistic post-modern cowboy fantasies like Wild West West.
Even Tom Ritter, a role who in the old movie days might have been handed to a teen idol, is here portrayed by Church, an actor who looks like he was carved from a block of knotty pine. It's no shock that Tom -- or Prentice -- can kill without hesitation when they have to, though the older man's equanimity toward all races and genders -- he's respectful to Native American as well as Chinese, to frightened virgins as well as veteran prostitutes -- seems a little more like something from the modern era. And even there, almost too good to be true. In lengthy dialogue interludes in the second half of this saga, Prentice explains his unlucky-in-love personal life and how that's deepened his character (he doesn't understand women, Chinese or American or miscellaneous, but he's not bitter about it).
Kids hoping for more action might get a little restless during these introspective moments, but those who can't get enough of Robert Duvall riding tall in the saddle should lasso the classic miniseries Lonesome Dove or the movie Open Range. For a considerably more fanciful rendition of Chinese on the American frontier, there's always the martial-arts silliness of Shanghai-Noon.
Rate It!
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Sexual ContentProstitution and sexual slavery as a business is a major part of the plot. Besides talk of venereal disease, there are some bosom-bulging tight corsets and brief nudity (not in a typical sexual context, but young Chinese women are inspected by a would-be buyer). |
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ViolenceMen and horses shot down. One man hung (off-camera). Men and women are brutally beaten. Cattle branding in closeup. A woman is trampled by stampeding horses. |
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Language"S--t" is as severe as it gets. |
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Social BehaviorRobert Duvall's character is almost too good and modern in his attitudes to be true, as he treats the Chinese in gentlemanly fashion and shoots a couple of white men on sight just because they're notorious Indian killers. Though he claims to have given up on happiness with females, he's still chivalrous when it counts. The other men in his posse follow in line. |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoDrunken cowboys, in and out of saloons, though some of the imbibing is friendly and social. |
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