VIVA VILLA! (1934)

Perhaps if more people knew Howard Hawks directed about half of this bio-pic on Pancho Villa, Mexico’s Revolutionary peasant general (M-G-M contract director Jack Conway got sole screen credit), the film might be as well known as it deserves to be.  Not the usual admiring Hollywood bio-pic*, indeed hardly ‘bio’ in Ben Hecht’s fabulist telling.  Here, Wallace Berry’s Pancho is just as interested in P.R. from American newsman Stuart Erwin as he is in killing old guard soldiers & politicians and returning land to the people.  This crude, effective Villa well matched to Berry’s crude, effective acting.  Often very funny, too.  The film reaching heights of weirdness as generals & politicians on both sides sabotage each other with Villa never too busy to miss a sexual opportunity.  Especially a sadistic evening with Far Wray’s stunning society socialist. (The film beat strict Hollywood Production Code enforcement by weeks.)  Best of all, the dazzling Mexicali look of the thing, with on-location atmosphere stunningly caught by cinematographer James Wong Howe.  If only Lee Tracy, replaced by Erwin as the reporter who not only prints the legend, but makes it up, hadn’t peed his way out of the pic and given Hawks (or was it the studio?) a chance to ankle this David O. Selznick production.  (Wray also a replacement, though a good one.)  Messy as it is, inaccurate as it is, sentimental as it is, this remains an often staggering achievement, the opening reel on young Pancho particularly masterful, along with sweeping battles & mass movement action.  Hecht’s punchy arguments and attitudes decades ahead of their time.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Visual transitions and battle montages by effects specialist Slavko Vorkapich at his best.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Over at Warners, a more traditional hagiographic Mexican bio-pic in JUAREZ/’39.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/01/juarez-1939.html

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  *Hecht’s idea of a Journalist-to-General relationship heavily influenced by his own experience in Germany where he was reporting on the brief rise of the Socialist Party, not long before the Nazis started to thrive as the Weimar Government collapsed.  One of the many highlights in his wildly uneven auto-bio, A CHILD OF THE CENTURY.