By John M. Whalen
There’s a scene in John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot
Liberty Valance†(1962) when a newspaper man says “This is the west, sir and
when legend becomes fact, print the legend.†Screenwriter Ben Hecht and
director Jack Conway seemed to have followed that sentiment in their biopic,
“Viva Villa!†(1934) which presents a highly fictionalized version of the life of Mexican
revolutionary Pancho Villa. Though not historically accurate, it’s an
entertaining and worthwhile film, and in its own way presents the truth about what
it means to be oppressed and to finally decide you’ve had a belly full and rise
up against it.
The opening scenes show the peones being told by Porfiro Diaz’s soldiers that their land is
being taken away from them. When they protest, the leader of the protesters is
given 100 lashes. His young son watches as the last lash is delivered and it’s
discovered the man is dead. “It must have been too much,†an officer says
derisively. The boy follows the man who wielded the whip into an alley and
stabs him to death. The boy is Pancho Villa.
Grown to manhood, the adult Villa (Wallace Beery) has
become a bandit, partners with another ruthless hombre, Sierra (Leo Carillo).
Beery plays Villa as a larger than life character of gargantuan appetites. He
drinks, eats, and kills as the impulse strikes him. Every beautiful woman he
sees he must have, and he marries each of them. As his reputation grows, a
contemplative little man named Francisco Madera starts a revolution and his friends,
wealthy landowner Don Felipe (Donald Cook) and his sister Teresa (Fay Wray), enlists
Villa in the cause. Villa recruits hundreds of villagers to fight and they free
city after city from the cruel dictator’s grasp. His exploits are recorded by an
American newspaper man, Johnny Sykes (Stuart Irwin), who helps create Villa’s
legend.
Things start to go wrong when Madera, a dreamy
idealist, thinks Villa’s tactics are too brutal, and puts him under the command
of General Pascal (Joseph Schildkraut). Pascal is an opportunist who uses both
Villa and Madera, until the day he can seize power for himself. Despite all
that Villa did for him, Madera excludes Villa from the government he forms in
Mexico City after Diaz resigns. Villa and Sierra return home to the hills of
Chihuahua, where they take up bank robbing again. For his crimes Madera has him
thrown in jail, and Pascal arranges for him to be executed. Madera stops the
execution but not before Pascal humiliates him by making him crawl in the dirt.
There’s a lot more to this big, sprawling story, and
Hecht’s script is tight, full of visual metaphors, most of which revolve around
the land that everyone’s fighting for, down to the last handful of dirt
clutched in a dying man’s hand.
Stories abound regarding the filming of “Viva Villa!â€
For example, the movie began with Howard Hawks directing and Lee Tracy playing
reporter Johnny Sykes. But Tracy had a drinking problem and apparently urinated
off his hotel room balcony, while screaming insults at a group of military
cadets. Tracy was hustled out of the country and Hawks was called back to
Hollywood by producer David. O. Selznick. The two of them got in a fight over
Tracy. Hawks wanted to keep him in the picture and he socked Selznick in the
nose and himself out of the picture. He was replaced by Conway. All previous
scenes were reshot.
Despite this setback, the reassembled cast and crew
managed to turn in solid performances in all the key roles. It’s arguably
Beery’s best film, and Schildkraut turns in a world class performance as a
vicious snake. Conway’s direction is solid and straightforward. The black and
white cinematography by James Wong Howe is first rate, highlighted as usual by
his use of sharp contrast in the bright daylight scenes shot in the Mexican
desert.
There are other films about the Mexican revolution,
including Elia Kazan’s “Viva Zapata,†(1952) which is more historically
accurate, and “Villa Rides†(1968) an adventure film played almost for laughs
with Yul Brynner as Villa and Robert Mitchum (script by Robert Towne and Sam
Peckinpah). But “Viva Villa!†has a timeless quality to it that holds up well
today and manages to show its influence on the films that followed. The Warner Archive has done a first rate job
of transferring the film to DVD. The original theatrical trailer also appears
on the disc. Recommended.
(John M. Whalen is the author of "Hunting Monsters is My Business: The Mordecai Slate Stories" . Click here to order the book from Amazon)