Guest Author - Sandy Mullins

I remember seeing the previous for Broken Trail and it looked interesting. Yesterday, while searching the channels, for my usual diversion “a movie at 5 P.M..” I found Broken Trail. I jumped for joy at the chance to see the movie. I will admit that it was the story line that intrigued me the most, and the cast wasn’t my main reason.

Story Line:
While driving a herd of horses cross country to their buyers, Print Ritter (Robert Duvall) and his estranged nephew Tom Harte (Thomas Haden Church) stumble upon five Chinese girls that were sold into prostitution in 1897. The girls abused and uncleared for are rescued, by our heroes. ‘Ritter’ names the girls 1, 2, 3, (no 4, its bad luck) 5, and 6 so he can differentiate them. ‘Ritter’ and ‘Harte’ plan is to get the horses delivered and the girls to get somewhere safe. At the first town they stop at, they have a Chinese man watch the girls, one girl gets rapped by a man in town and Hart and the other man with ‘Ritter’ and ‘Harte’ stop it. One of the prostitutes that tried to help and got beat by the rapists, the Chinese Man who got beat-up and our party ever growing all head out of town, The woman, Big Rump Kate (Rusty Schwimmer) that purchased the girls, and a couple of her men try and stop them, but our group makes it out of town. ‘Big Rump Kate’ sends one of her men ‘Big Ears’(Chris Mulkey) after them when she finds out that Ritter and Hart have them and wont turn them over to her.

Will our party of now party ten, make it to their destination ok? Will love spark between: Print Ritter and Nola (Greta Scacchi) and Tom Harte and Sun Fu (Gwendoline Yeo)? Will the young Chinese girl that was raped be okay? These are all questions that you find yourself asking before the first half in over.


The characters are well developed, you hate the bad guys and grow to respect and love the heroes ‘Ritter’ and ‘Hart’. You find yourself rooting for budding relationships between ‘Ritter’ and ‘Nola’ and ‘Hart’ and ‘Sun Fu’.

The ending is emotional and pleasing. I especially liked the ‘what happened after pieces’ of the story. It sounds like it was based on real people, which makes it even more pleasing to me. That’s probably because right now I am deep into my family genealogies and finding out more and more about the people in my ancestry.

You can catch Broken Trail on American Movie Classics (AMC) they are making you wait for airings its showing about once every two weeks. Look for it, its well worth the four hours.