Before there was Avatar, before there was even Dances With Wolves, there was Broken Arrow.

I wasn’t expecting much out of this film. I picked it solely because it had Jimmy Stewart, and he’s been missing from this feature for too long. I knew from the description that it was about the wars with the Apache, who have always been the genre’s favorite villainous redskins. Again, I wasn’t expecting much.

If there was one thing that was pounded into my head in college, it was that no movie ever portrayed Native Americans fairly. They were all John Wayne propaganda pieces that justified our rape and pillage of the land over and over again. It was one of those little facts that justified my disdain for Western movies for years.

But it turns out my American history classes weren’t entirely right, at least in the case of one film. Broken Arrow was the first film to actually portray the Native Americans in a sympathetic and fair light, and while it stumbles in authenticity, it deserves an A for effort. The fact that it comes from one of Hollywood’s stauncher Republicans (Stewart was a proud conservative) is a nice surprise.

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We’ve been known to give John Travolta a hard time around here, and we don’t mean to. The guy has got some serious acting chops, and he’s still getting work after all these years. Any actor/actress that has fa diverse set of ilms like like Broken Arrow, Pulp Fiction, Hairspray, and Look Who’s Talking on a resume deserves some credit, so we’ll give it to him.

His newest film, From Paris With Love, seems to throw Travolta into a role that was definitely meant for another actor, if not many. His image in this film is something we’ve never seen before (not counting Pelham) and it’s quite refreshing to see an actor reinvent himself over and over in a span of 40 years.

In a new clip from the Pierre Morel (Taken) film, Travolta, as special agent Charlie Wax, infiltrates an enemy hideout in an unconventional way. Check out the clip after the jump, and be sure to catch From Paris With Love in theaters on February 5th.

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