Independent Films, Film Profiles

Broken Trail

Broken Trail is a June 2006 Emmy Award-winning revisionist Western miniseries that originally aired on American Movie Classics as their first original movie. It stars Robert Duvall and Thomas Haden Church, and was directed by Walter Hill.The screenplay for Broken Trail was written by Alan Geoffrion, who also wrote the novel of the same name. Novelist and screenwriter Alan Geoffrion weaves together two facts — British were buying horses in the American West in the late 1800s and Chinese women were being transported from the West Coast to the interior to serve as prostitutes — along with a series of Western vignettes.Set in 1898, the film concerns Prentice "Print" Ritter (Robert Duvall), an aging cowboy who wants to buy a ranch of his own. To accomplish this, he agrees to transport 500 mustangs from Oregon to Wyoming, where he will sell them to the British Army. He recruits his estranged nephew, Tom Harte (Thomas Haden Church), to join him, hoping to reconnect with him on the ride.What starts out as a simple horse drive is complicated when Print and Tom encounter a particularly vile slaver who is transporting five Chinese girls to a lawless mining town, where they will face a life of prostitution and indentured servitude. Compelled to do the right thing, Print and Tom rescue the women and take them in, but as they continue their perilous trek across the frontier, they are tailed by a vicious gang of outlaws sent by the whorehouse madam who originally paid for the girls.