With its guerrilla maneuverings, cat and mouse pursuits, and relentless underdogs, Kelly Lytle Hernández’s gripping history book Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands would make an excellent movie, even if it seems unlikely that Hollywood would warm up to the story of the impoverished anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón, whose work as a journalist, an organizer, and an overall firebrand lit the long fuse of the Mexican Revolution. This is probably just as well; a movie-star gloss would struggle to do this story justice. A native production would surely ring truer.
But there have been big movies, with big stars, about the revolution, some of them quite good (though not all; you’d probably be wise to skip Pancho Villa [1972], starring Telly Savalas as the revolution’s northern leader. Who loves ya, baby?). The most prominent is probably Viva Zapata! (1952), starring Marlon Brando as Pancho Villa’s counterpart in the south, Emiliano Zapata. The whitewashed casting conventions of the day yield some wince-worthy results: nobody will ever mistake the mumbling method-acting king for a Mexican; Jean Peters, as Zapata’s wife, Josefa, seems to have wandered in from another movie, not to mention another country; and Alan Reed, best known as the voice of Fred Flintstone, plays Villa as someone similar to, well, Fred Flintstone. However, the Chihuahua-born Anthony Quinn won an Oscar for playing Zapata’s brother Eufemio. And the very idea of making a star-studded movie at midcentury about the Mexican Revolution was a pretty radical gambit.
Directed by Elia Kazan, with whom Brando reinvented screen acting in On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire, and written by John Steinbeck, Viva Zapata! is a taut portrait of a country on the brink of massive change. President-dictator Porfirio Díaz (Fay Roope), the primary target of the magonistas’ push for reform, rules with an autocratic fist; the beginning of the film finds him waxing paternal over a group of Indigenous farmers whose land has been seized by powerful Díaz cronies. Zapata isn’t having it. He leads a workers’ revolt and helps overthrow Díaz’s 34-year rule, ushering in the election of Francisco Madero, portrayed by Harold Gordon as a well-meaning weakling. Madero is, in turn, overthrown and murdered by strong-arm general and Díaz holdover Victoriano Huerta (a convincingly chilling Frank Silvera). This will not be a short revolution.
Though primarily a Zapata biopic and a showcase for Brando, Viva Zapata! proves wise to the ways of power vacuums and the ways in which they’re filled, a central dynamic of the Mexican Revolution (and most others). Kazan, regardless of what one might think of his decision to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee, was a thrillingly modern director, ahead of his time in his ability to depict raw but complex emotion on-screen. Despite its flaws and its roots in classical Hollywood tradition, the movie is a minor miracle, given the era in which it was made. The ’50s were far from Hollywood’s most radical period, and a dramatic thumbnail sketch of the revolution’s early days was definitely not par for the course.
Seventeen years (and a series of seismic industry shifts) later, another U.S. movie took on the Mexican Revolution from a more oblique angle. Indeed, The Wild Bunch (1969), at first glance, isn’t about the revolution at all. Read between its blood-soaked lines, however, and you’ll quickly see its relevance.
Sam Peckinpah’s symphony of violence tells the story of an outlaw gang looking for one more score before they hang up their spurs. The year is 1913; the frontier, for most purposes, is closed. Reeling from the brutal fiasco of a botched robbery that opens the film, the Bunch, led by William Holden’s Pike Bishop, cross the Rio Grande from South Texas to northern Mexico. Among their members is Angel (Jaime Sánchez), whose idyllic village the Bunch visit once they cross the border. Angel’s home has been pillaged by Mapache (Emilio Fernández), a corrupt, bloated general serving under Huerta. Mapache has killed Angel’s father and taken Angel’s girlfriend. But the mercenary Bunch, who can barely hide their disdain for this despot, still want to do business with the general. They agree to deliver him 16 cases of stolen rifles in return for a payment of gold. Angel agrees to help them, as long as they let him take a case for his village, which is fighting Mapache under the banner of Villa. Mapache discovers Angel’s deceit, takes him captive, and has his men torture him.
The carnage that concludes the film, as the remaining Bunch attack Mapache and his men, is widely celebrated for its editing and cinematography. But it also speaks to the revolutionary spirit. The Bunch feel palpable shame for sacrificing Angel to a petty tyrant. When Mapache cruelly cuts Angel’s throat, the Bunch pump him full of lead. Then, Pike blows a hole in one of Mapache’s German advisers. Badly outnumbered and outgunned, the Bunch continue with their suicide mission. When it’s over, bodies from both sides littering the ground, Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), forced by a craven railroad tycoon to hunt his old friend Pike, shows up, followed by irascible, elder Bunch member Freddie Sykes (Edmond O’Brien), who is accompanied by members of Angel’s village, who swoop in to collect the fallen weapons. Sykes has a proposition for Thornton: “Me and the boys here, we got some work to do. You wanna come along?” Tired of the mercenary life, they will join the fight against Huerta, a fight that the film, in the end, tacitly endorses.
Neither Viva Zapata! nor The Wild Bunch can do justice to the complexities of the Mexican Revolution, especially not to the lucrative U.S. investment in Mexico under the Díaz reign that Bad Mexicans so deftly delineates. But the fact that Hollywood was willing to dip its toe in the water with these films and others, including HBO’s intriguing 2003 movie And Starring Pancho Villa As Himself, suggests that more-daring treatments are possible. Who knows? Perhaps even the magonistas will get their turn in the spotlight.•
Join us on September 21 at 5 p.m., when Hernández will appear in conversation with a special guest and California Book Club host John Freeman to discuss Bad Mexicans. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
