The best American film about Pancho Villa
Just as the best book in
English on the Mexican Revolution is Villa and Zapata, A Biography of the
Mexican Revolution by Frank McLynn (Jonathan Cape, 2000), so the best non-Mexican film
about Pancho Villa is And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself, an HBO
offering of 2004.
Excellent book
Excellent film
The film has one huge
advantage; it stars Antonio Banderas who captures perfectly the energy,
ruthlessness, charm, courage, affection and violence of Villa. He is perfectly
splendid.
Pancho Villa
The film was nominated for
and won a heap of awards, including an Emmy, and justifiably so. Its production
values are sky-high (they should be; the budget was $30m, a huge sum for a TV
film). The direction (Australian Bruce Beresford, Driving Miss Daisy, A Good
Man in Africa, but no Westerns)
is faultless. The editing is taut and exciting (that’s what got the Emmy). The
Peter James photography is fine and the music by Stephen Endelman and Joseph
Vitarelli is right. And the script is very well written by Larry Gelbart (best
known for Tootsie but we’ll let that pass).
The story is based on the
amazing, true one of Villa doing a deal with an American motion picture
company to film battles as they happened. Villa needed US support and gold. The
movie got him both. He really did agree to fight his battles in daylight and
re-enact any that weren’t captured on film.
Spectators on the Texas side
Playing opposite Banderas
as “the other Francisco” is Eion Bailey as Frank Thayer, who is solid and does
a good job. He had had a part in Fight Club but is best known for Band
of Brothers, but no Westerns. Playing foil to Villa’s fire and fury
(license to chew the scenery), Bailey was rather obliged to be calm but at
times his performance verges on the stolid. Villa films are obliged to have an
American as foil, usually a journalist. There is also Alan Arkin, excellent as
New York Jewish machine-gunner Sam Drebben, with a good aim and a foul mouth.
Arkin: excellent
Damián Alcázar does a fine
job as Villa’s private executioner, the odious and sadistic Rodolfo Fierro (who
was hated by everyone, especially his own men, and came to a grisly end not
shown in the film). He was ‘Sierra’ (Leo Carrillo) in the 1934 movie. The
brutality of the man is symbolized in both films by his shooting more than one
captive with the same bullet “to save ammunition.” The symbolic death of a boy
soldier is another moment in this film reprised from the ’34 movie.
The executioner Rodolfo Fierro (Damián Alcázar)
Pedro Armendariz Jr., who plays Don Luis Terrazas,
played Pancho Villa in the movie Old
Gringo, and is the son of the famous Pedro Armendariz who also played
Pancho Villa in Mexican films.
Good stuff. The actual contract that Villa signed with Thayer and
the Mutual Film Company on 5 January 1914 to film the battle of Ojinaga still
exists and is in a museum in Mexico City. Tragically, the original movie, directed by
Christy Cabanne and written by Frank E Woods in 1914, has been lost, like so
many early films of inestimable historical value, although a few scenes still
exist in the Library of Congress in Washington DC. There's an interesting documentary about the lost reels made by the University of Guadalajara, Los rollos perdidos de Pancho Villa, which includes some fascinating existing scenes. But this HBO picture is a
worthy tribute to that lost film and, more importantly, to the great Pancho
Villa.
Villa and the film crew
The movie is a bit pro-Villa, which is what the Hearst
newspapers accused Griffith's vanished classic of being, but that’s partly because
of Banderas’s charisma, and the film shows enough of the horrors to avoid accusations
of whitewash. The film was made during the 2003 invasion of Iraq: maybe
we are supposed to see Fox News in the jingoistic reporting of the Hearst
Publishing Company. Jack Reed reminds Thayer at his film’s premiere, “The first
casualty of war is truth”.
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