I Confess (1953)

***
Country: US
Director: Alfred Hitchcock

The nine years between Strangers on a Train in 1951 and Psycho in 1960 mark the most fecund period of Alfred Hitchcock's career: five outright masterpieces (Strangers, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho), three near-masterpieces (To Catch a Thief, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and The Wrong Man), and three lesser but still quite good movies (I Confess, Dial M for Murder, and The Trouble with Harry). I Confess has never been considered one of Hitchcock's great works (although San Francisco Chronicle movie critic Mick LaSalle once named it Hitchcock's most underrated). The quality and artistry of Hitchcock's films did create extraordinarily high expectations, though, so even if I Confess doesn't sustain the level of brilliance of his best pictures, it is still by any standards a good film. And in its best moments, it manages to reach the heights his greatest films more consistently achieve.

It's clear why I Confess appealed to Hitchcock, for it centers on a variation of the theme of the falsely accused man that he returned to time and again, from The 39 Steps (1935) to Frenzy (1972). This time around, the man falsely accused of murder is a Roman Catholic priest, Father Michael Logan (Montgomery Clift), who lives in Quebec City in Canada. Another interesting variation on the typical Hitchcock movie of this type is that the identity of the real killer is known from the beginning. He is Otto Keller, the handyman at the parish house where Father Logan lives, and the victim is a shady lawyer named Villette, for whom Keller worked as a gardener. When he arrives back at the cathedral after the murder and sees Father Logan, he insists that Father Logan hear his confession. Since Keller is quite an unscrupulous schemer, it's not clear whether he is really seeking absolution for his crime or using the sanctity of the confessional as a way to silence the only witness to his late-night return after the killing. When it turns out the murdered lawyer was also blackmailing Ruth Grandfort (Anne Baxter), the wife of a prominent politician, because of a secret relationship between her and Father Logan, the priest becomes implicated in the murder. Father Logan then finds himself in the difficult position of being obligated to follow his vows and remain silent about Keller's confession even though it means he might very well be hanged for the murder himself.

The first hour or so of the movie concentrates on the question of what is the exact nature of the relationship between Mme Grandfort and Father Logan and why they are taking such pains to conceal it. The police inspector investigating the murder, Inspector Larrue (Karl Malden), is immediately suspicious of Father Logan and believes the worst—that he and Ruth are having an affair—and won't let up until he winkles the truth out of Mme Grandfort. When she finally does tell him the truth, believing she is exonerating Father Logan, she is in fact unintentionally giving the Crown Prosecutor (Brian Aherne) the evidence he needs to try the priest for murder. The rest of the movie focuses on Father Logan's conflict between his vows and his instinct for self-preservation and on the question of whether he will remain true to his religious beliefs or reveal that Keller is the murderer. Keller complicates matters even more by planting false evidence and by telling bald-faced lies on the witness stand that further implicate the priest.

I Confess was actually based on a play, but this is never apparent, so thoroughly does Hitchcock cinematize the screenplay by shooting so much of it outdoors (he makes excellent use of the Canadian locations), by making the interiors far more varied than they must have been in the original play, and by generally re-conceiving the play in cinematic terms. Nowhere is this more evident than in the crucial sequence that acts as the bridge between the two parts of the movie, an extended flashback during which Ruth explains the history between herself and Father Logan to Inspector Larrue, her husband, and the Crown Prosecutor. The ten-minute long sequence is both the dramatic centerpiece and the cinematic high point of I Confess and in its own understated way ranks with the best set pieces Hitchcock ever filmed. In the play this scene must have been a long monologue delivered by Mme Grandfort, but in the movie it is presented as an intricate interweaving of the present and a prolonged flashback narrated by Baxter.

As Mme Grandfort begins her story, the camera starts a pan to the right that segues into a dissolve to the past, with Baxter's dialogue continuing in voice-over. After a few moments, the camera begins another pan to the right, and the scene dissolves back to the present, where Ruth is still speaking to the other people in the room. A few seconds later another pan to the right leads to another dissolve to the past. This process, shifting back and forth between the present and the past with pans and dissolves, is repeated no fewer than fourteen times during the sequence. Taken together, the flashbacks tell the entire backstory of Ruth and Father Logan, the whole brilliantly staged, photographed, edited, and acted in pantomime by Clift and Baxter. The sequence constitutes a virtual movie-within-a-movie, its first section, underscored by Dimitri Tiomkin's ethereal music, as lyrically romantic as any love sequence Hitchcock ever made, before the mood turns more menacing and sinister. Spatially, the series of pans and dissolves forms a sort of 360-degree cinematic panorama, a continuous narrative circle spanning past and present that begins and ends at the same point. It is an astounding sequence even for this director and alone makes the film a must for any fan of Hitchcock. Here is the lead-in to the sequence and its beginning, which starts at about the 3:00 point:



Besides that tour de force sequence, I Confess has many smaller but also memorable moments containing images that continue to resonate long after the movie is over. The film opens with a montage of scenes of the city's empty streets late at night, interspersed with street signs that read "DIRECTION" with an arrow pointing to the right, almost as if we are being led into a labyrinth and directed to the scene of the crime. As Keller returns through these same streets after committing the murder, Hitchcock and cinematographer Robert Burks (he worked on twelve of Hitchcock's films, winning an Oscar for To Catch a Thief) go for an expressionistic, film noir look with raked camera angles and harsh, horizontal, low-level lighting. When we first meet Inspector Larrue, he is interviewing Villette's servant, his face obscured by the back of the servant's head. Malden slowly moves to the side until the right half of his face emerges as he stares at something that has caught his attention, which we then see in a reverse shot through the window is Father Logan meeting Ruth on the sidewalk across the street. Already Larrue's suspicions of the two have been aroused. During a sequence where Father Logan is wandering the streets of Quebec while the police search for him, he stops and gazes at a man's suit displayed in a store window, and you can see him thinking how much easier everything would have been for him and Ruth—or could be even now—if he were wearing that suit and not a priest's cassock. Over and over we see staircases, both inside and especially outside as people traverse the hilly city (Hitchcock makes his signature appearance on such an outdoor stairway in the very first scene), and Father Logan, photographed from low down, seems to be constantly peering up to the sky as though looking for some sign or reminding himself of his priestly vocation and duty to remain silent about Keller's confession.

It might seem strange that after praising so many individual elements of I Confess, I don't give it a higher overall rating. The answer to that is actually pretty simple. Almost everything I've singled out for attention occurs in the first hour. The rest of the film simply does not maintain the level of visual or dramatic interest of that first hour, and I can't help wondering if this reflects a tapering off of enthusiasm on Hitchcock's part after the first section of the narrative is over. That part is dominated by the mystery, not of who the culprit is, but of what is the relationship between Father Logan and Ruth and what it is they're hiding, a mystery that engages us by focusing on the characters' emotions and by teasing us with isolated details without revealing the whole story. Once the true nature of the history between these two is disclosed, there is no way the courtroom scenes and outcome of the trial which come after can involve us in the way the more personal story of the first part did. It is all too clear that Father Logan will not divulge Keller's guilt even to save himself, and the movie becomes a conventional courtroom drama, its imagery limited to the routine by the familiar nature of the plot, its dramatic focus limited to a rather abstract and not terribly suspenseful ethical dilemma.

Still, I Confess is certainly a movie worth watching. It might lose momentum part way through, yet despite its unevenness, it is plainly the work of a master craftsman whose amazing skills do a great deal to make up for the relative flaccidity of the movie's concluding section.

Mr. Arkadin (1955): The 2006 Complete Version

***^½
Country: France-Spain-Switzerland
Director: Orson Welles

"Mr. Arkadin has an insouciant air of what Welles might have done at a weekend house party if admirers asked him, Could you do a Citizen Kane again?"

—David Thomson, "Have You Seen . . . ?"

Even for an Orson Welles project, Mr. Arkadin has a strange, convoluted, and sad history. Written and directed by Welles, it was filmed in 1954 in several European locations and a studio in Madrid and then the eight hours of raw footage worked over in the editing room by Welles for several months. After more than a year without a final cut, the film was taken out of his hands by the producer, who had it re-edited as a straightforward chronological story without the flashback structure Welles had intended, retitled Confidential Report, and released at 93 minutes in 1955. It's important to keep in mind that at this point—before film studies and film schools became established parts of academia; before museum, repertory cinema, and film society retrospectives became common events—Citizen Kane hadn't been seen by most people for years. It didn't even make the 1952 Sight and Sound critics' poll of the ten best films of all time (although it has been #1 in every subsequent survey). Welles's reputation was basically that of a pompous has-been, so it probably never occurred to those involved in Confidential Report that they were vandalizing the work of one of the great geniuses of cinema.

Just three years later, though, Kane had been rediscovered, appearing in the 1958 Brussels World Fair survey as one of the twelve best films of all time, and Welles's standing elevated to that of one of the great cinema artists. Not to be outdone, in 1958 the young iconoclasts at Cahiers du Cinéma issued their own list of the twelve best films, and incredibly it contained not Citizen Kane but Confidential Report, the mangled version of Mr. Arkadin. Years after the film was finally released in the U.S. in 1962, I saw it while in college, and my reaction was that it was inconceivable that this rambling, barely coherent mess was the work of the man who had made Citizen Kane. In 2006 Criterion released what they called The Complete Version of Mr. Arkadin, compiled from several sources and more than twenty minutes longer than the release version. The Criterion reconstruction is essentially a new film, and to watch it for the first time is to discover an unknown masterwork by one of the greatest of all filmmakers.

The 2006 version restores the flashback structure Welles had envisioned, briefly teasing the viewer with two mysterious events—the body of a woman found washed up on a beach in Spain and an empty chartered plane discovered flying over Spain—before opening on Christmas Day in Munich. Here a young American, Guy Van Stratten (Robert Arden), is trying to convince a decrepit old man just released from prison, Jakob Zouk (Akim Tamiroff), that their lives are in danger from a millionaire named Gregory Arkadin (Welles). Desperate to convince the skeptical old man that they must act quickly to save themselves, Van Stratten then tells the story of how he came to realize this danger. The story proper begins with the peculiar last words of a dying man—one of which is the name Gregory Arkadin—whispered on a dock in Naples. The man has been murdered, and Van Stratten, an opportunist who senses in the situation money, possibly from blackmail, sets about pursuing the connection between the murdered man and the Aristotle Onassis-like millionaire Arkadin.

After tracking down Arkadin, Van Stratten finds himself hired by the enigmatic financier, who claims to be an amnesiac with no recollection of his origins, to investigate his early life. As Van Stratten travels across Europe and eventually to Mexico, he does locate several people, each of whom is able to supply one more piece of the jigsaw puzzle that is Arkadin's past. The only hitch is that right after Van Stratten interviews these people, each of them is murdered just like the man on the dock. Van Stratten belatedly realizes that he has been hired not to reveal Arkadin's history but to conceal it forever, that he is being used as a stalking horse to find those who know of Arkadin's disreputable and criminal past so that they can be eliminated. Finally, the only two people left to tell Arkadin's story are Van Stratten and Zouk.

With such a plot, it is impossible to think of Mr. Arkadin without comparing it to Citizen Kane, for it is in many ways a variation—some might even call it a semi-remake—of that earlier film. We have a dying man's cryptic last words, a flashback structure, the organization of the narrative as a series of episodes as an investigator tries to piece together the life story of a famous man by interviewing people from his past, the quest for the truth behind the façade of a mysterious public figure. Most obvious of all, we have the larger-than-life, almost mythic title character, the person who unites all the disparate pieces of the plot. With his by-now stout build, orotund voice and diction, and curly wig and square-cut beard, Welles seems like the statue of a Greek god come to life. I immediately thought of Zeus; a character in the movie remarks at one point that he looks like Poseidon. What an appropriate look for a man whose identity is essentially a self-created myth and whose power lies in his ability—in this case through money, violence, and manipulation of his public image—to control events. And Welles's rather theatrical acting style is a perfect match for this sinister, devious, and ultimately bogus character.

The reconstructed Mr. Arkadin becomes a real showcase for all of Welles's cinematic strengths. Like many directors who also are, or have been, actors, Welles gets amazing work from his fellow performers. The episodic nature of the film allows him to construct it as a series of set pieces focused on an individual actor, and he clearly encouraged each of them to pull out all the stops to create a memorably colorful character: Tamiroff as the dying, fatalistic Zouk; Mischa Auer as a flea circus master (I'm not kidding—Welles actually takes time to show the fleas performing as Van Stratten does his interview); Michael Redgrave as a pawnshop owner (in what appears to be a sendup of Alec Guinness's Fagin in Oliver Twist); Suzanne Flon as a down-on-her-luck aristocrat; best of all the inimitable Katina Paxinou (the poor man's Anna Magnani), with her raddled face, as the retired mastermind of a white slavery ring, now living in luxury in Mexico and whiling away the time playing cards.

The film also shows Welles's astounding ability as the complete cinematic visualist. You could turn off the sound, forget the plot, and just watch the images on the screen and still spend 105 minutes totally enthralled by what you're looking at. How many directors can that be said of? Murnau, von Sternberg, Eisenstein, Kurosawa, today maybe David Lynch and Terrence Malick—certainly no more than a handful in the history of cinema. In all of Mr. Arkadin there is not a camera placement, composition, shot, scene, or edit that is dull. Everything in the film is conceived to create and sustain maximum visual impact. If the ideas and narrative details of the film occasionally seem less than fully coalesced, the images never do, always underscoring that Welles was one of the cinema's great masters of visualization.

David Thomson calls Mr. Arkadin a "tattered" film. I agree with that statement, but I think the film's tattered nature suggests a lot about Welles's working methods. In Citizen Kane, Welles was reined in by a precision-engineered script that was pretty much tamperproof. But in his subsequent projects, he usually wrote his own screenplays, and the films which resulted from them plainly show that he had a huge problem controlling the chaotic profusion of ideas that poured from him. In a way, I see him as a victim of his own overexuberance, unable to limit his imagination, to select and focus on the pertinent details and discard the rest, or even to settle on a consistent vision of what he wanted. He was not only a man who couldn't make up his mind, but one who simply didn't know when to stop.

Watching Mr. Arkadin, I get the sense that Welles's working methods, at least when working from his own scripts, must have been more like those of a novelist than a screenwriter. He had a rough idea of the whole and a specific vision of some of the parts, but not a fixed plan of the film as a finished product. Like many novelists, he approached his films with a sense of spontaneity and improvisation, a faith in sudden inspiration that led to a willingness to expand, revise, change direction, and go with the creative impulse of the moment, to experiment with multiple approaches, to allow the work to evolve as it went along in the belief that it could all be shaped and edited into a coherent whole later. It seems that the process rarely turned out that way in the end, though, either because he grew tired of the project and moved on to something else or because his backers eventually became disenchanted with his lack of self-discipline and decided to take matters into their own hands. Maybe what really interested Welles was more the process of filmmaking than the finished product, and that is the real reason he so often had difficulty seeing a project through to completion.

Of course, all this is speculative. What is not is that Mr. Arkadin is a fascinating film that shows that with the right support, the post-Kane Welles was still capable of creating an immensely satisfying movie. Even if he needed help doing it, he was still clearly the source of the unique sensibility that shaped the film. That is in essence my understanding of the term auteur as it applies to filmmakers.

Hilary Swank Famous Actress

 

Hilary Swank

 

Hillary

Actress Hilary Swank

Pictures of  Famous Actors and Actresses

The Lovers (1958)

***
Country: France
Director: Louis Malle

Even though Louis Malle was a contemporary of Truffaut, Godard, and Resnais and began directing films in the late 1950s, just as the New Wave began to dominate French filmmaking, I've never really thought of him as part of that movement. His first movie, Elevator to the Gallows (1957), with its nod to the anarchy of American films like They Live by Night and Gun Crazy in its subplot of young punks on a crime spree, did bear a resemblance to the early work of Godard and Truffaut. But his next projects were all quite different from one another—what David Thomson refers to as his "moving rather aimlessly from one subject to another"—and for the rest of his long career he never seemed to settle into a favored theme or easily identifiable style. The Lovers strikes me as almost his version of the Douglas Sirk women's pictures of the 1950s and reminds me in some ways of the film I think of as the archetypal Sirk movie of that kind, All That Heaven Allows.

The credits of The Lovers open over a map, which looks as though it might date from an earlier century, of an estate with a large lake labeled Lac de l'Indifférence in the the middle (the Criterion website identifies this as the Carte du tendre, "a 'map' of amorous relations drawn by Madeleine de Scudéry in the seventeenth century"), and with sensuous music of Brahms playing on the soundtrack. In some ways, the movie plays like an update of a romantic novel of the 19th century—Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, for example. (According to various sources, the film is loosely derived from a French novel, Point de Lendemain by Dominique Vivant, published in 1777.) In The Lovers, Jeanne Moreau plays a character not unlike Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina, Jeanne Tournier, the young wife of an older man, Henri Tournier (Alain Cuny), the publisher of the major newspaper in Dijon. Trapped in a dull, loveless marriage to a man engrossed in his career and marooned in a remote country house, Jeanne is the epitome of the bored, neglected, and aimless upper middle-class housewife.

She has a daughter whom she appears to love, but who is cared for largely by her nanny. The house, almost a mini-château, is her husband's family home staffed by longtime family servants, and she has little to do with the running of it, her role limited to things like planning the menus. She lives for her frequent visits to Paris, where she stays with her rich friend Maggy doing the things idle women of their social class do to pass the time—shopping for clothes, getting her hair done, going to nightclubs, and carrying on an affair with Raoul Flores (José Villalonga), a polo player. When Jeanne's husband persuades her to invite Maggy and Raoul for the weekend, the scene seems to be set for a country weekend psychodrama. But the unforeseen happens when Jeanne's car breaks down on the way home on the day her friends are to arrive, and unable to get it repaired, she accepts a ride home from a young archaeologist, Bernard (Jean-Marc Bory), whom her husband invites to spend the night also.

Malle and Moreau emphasize the satiric possibilities in Jeanne and her lifestyle, painting a sardonically exaggerated picture of a vapid woman living a life of mindless consumerism. Appropriately, this part of the film minimizes narrative incident to concentrate instead on surfaces and appearances, and as photographed by the great Henri Decaë, those appear immaculately polished and ordered. Jeanne's house looks like an illustration from a glossy coffee table book on the traditional French country house, and Moreau, costumed and coiffed in the most chic manner imaginable, looks sensational. Her style-worshiping Jeanne, preoccupied with her image, what she calls her genre, is at once ridiculous and pathetic—ridiculous in her obsession with the superficial, pathetic in her blindness to the shallowness and aridity of her life. Her devotion to the trivial reaches its fullest and most comic expression on the way back to her home with Bernard—he refuses to drive any faster, saying "J'ai horreur de la vitesse" (I have a dread of speed)—in her petulant agitation that she will be late for the arrival of her best friend and lover.

That evening, when Jeanne, feeling vaguely unsettled, wanders outside for a moonlight stroll dressed in her nightgown and still wearing her pearls from dinner, she unexpectedly encounters the hunky young intellectual who until now has only irritated her with his nonconformity and his ridicule of her bourgeois values. As he pursues her through the garden, the atmosphere becomes charged with a surging current of eroticism, and her dislike of him gradually transforms into something she at first doesn't acknowledge but soon surrenders herself to: sexual attraction. At this point the film switches gears completely and becomes a voluptuous, ultra-romantic love story with a seduction in a rowboat on that ironically named Lake of Indifference, followed by a night of rapturous lovemaking in Jeanne's room. The sudden, almost disjunctive tonal contrast between this part of the film and what preceded it is the one element of The Lovers that places it squarely in the tradition of the New Wave.
Even with the floridly romantic tone of this part of the movie, it's obvious that Jeanne's attraction to Bernard is not only emotional but strongly physical and that the main thing missing from her life, and which until this point she seems to have been completely unaware of, is sexual fulfillment. Today this may seem innocuous enough, but in the 1950s it was sufficient to make The Lovers highly controversial, causing a stir both when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival and when it opened commercially in France. In the U.S. it was banned in Ohio, becoming the subject of a court case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, which overturned the ban. The sex isn't even explicit (although there is a clear suggestion that Bernard introduces Jeanne to oral sex), but that, combined with the subversive idea that women actually have sex drives like men, was enough to make the film as notorious as D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterly's Lover had been in its day.

If this kind of plot was hardly new territory for the movies, the attitudes expressed in the film were. In the movies, a woman who behaved in this way—who abandoned her husband, children, and stable middle-class existence for the thrill of a sexual fling—typically had to pay for her transgression of prevailing societal values. Sexual fulfillment was shown to be transient and ultimately meaningless, and the affair was fated to end badly. Malle was having none of this, though. In The Lovers, sexual fulfillment is equated with emotional fulfillment, and at the conclusion of the film Jeanne tells us that even if it doesn't last, she doesn't care. Ultimately, the most shocking thing to viewers in the 1950s might not have been the film's candor about sexuality, but the threat implicit in its rejection of the traditional notion that women achieve satisfaction through marriage, children, and conformity to the chaste and repressive behavioral ideals of the time.

Viva Zapata! (1952)

***
Country: US
Director: Elia Kazan

Viva Zapata! has all the earmarks of a studio prestige project. Marlon Brando's first movie after he created such a sensation in A Streetcar Named Desire, it was directed by his Streetcar director, Elia Kazan, during the heyday of Kazan's career and personally produced by the head of Twentieth Century-Fox, Darryl F. Zanuck. The screenplay was by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer John Steinbeck, who would receive the Nobel Prize for Literature ten years later. The film received five Oscar nominations (winning one—Anthony Quinn for best supporting actor), including one for best actor for Brando, who did win best actor awards at the Cannes Film Festival and from the British Academy. Given the formidable talent involved and the praise the film has received (David Thomson calls it "impressive" and "original"), it's one that I've looked forward to seeing for many years and was finally able to when it premiered on TCM recently. (It won't be available on DVD until next month.) I have to say, though, that despite all the care obviously lavished on it, my reaction is that this is a work of mixed quality that does not fully live up to its reputation.

Marlon Brando as Zapata in his bizarre-looking makeup

Set during the Mexican Revolution of the early 20th century, the film deals with the role in those events of Emiliano Zapata, an illiterate peasant who became one of the heroes of that revolution, the gravity of this subject another indication of the seriousness with which this project was approached by all involved. Brando is very good indeed in the title part (although I have to ask myself, "What were they thinking when they put him in that absurd makeup?"). He plays Zapata very quietly, almost meekly in one of his most subtle, least affected performances. This is a man in conflict, yet Brando conveys that conflict less as externalized turmoil than as internalized confusion. Zapata is no zealot, but an uncomplicated man who, because others admire the way he speaks his mind and acts on the strength of his convictions, is called upon to become a leader. He does reluctantly accept that role, allowing circumstances to direct him into a course of action he does not feel naturally suited for. But unlike nearly everyone else in the film, his ideals are not subverted by the power he finds himself wielding, and he eventually forgoes that power because he cannot accept the inevitable necessity to compromise his principles. In the end, though, he finds that the simple people he loves will not allow him to remain in retirement and that he must sacrifice his own desires, and eventually his life, to give the people what they need. Like so many of Steinbeck's heroes, he becomes a martyr. Brando, however, manages to avoid the sanctimony and self-righteousness that are the pitfalls of such a contrivance, stoically accepting that he must put aside his own welfare for the common good.

As you might expect in a movie directed by Kazan, who himself started as a stage and film actor and worked as a stage director in the 1940s, there are other good performances in the film as well. After more than fifteen years playing forgettable parts, Mexican-born Anthony Quinn, playing Zapata's brother Eufemio, finally found his niche, one from which he rarely strayed for the rest of his long career. Interestingly, he had replaced Brando as Stanley Kowalski when the stage version of Streetcar went on tour, and many years later was one of several actors considered for Don Corleone in The Godfather before Brando, who was Francis Ford Coppola's first choice but whose reputation for being difficult and demanding made Paramount executives nervous, was finally cast. Quinn excels in his later scenes when he abandons his revolutionary ideals to self-interest and becomes a disillusioned, hedonistic wreck. Jean Peters, a Fox starlet of the early 1950s who later married Howard Hughes, is surprisingly understated and believable as Zapata's wife, Josefa, and has quite good chemistry with Brando.

There is also much to admire in Kazan's direction. He stages key scenes with great imagination and visual force: the scene in which Zapata and others gradually surround a group of mounted soldiers leading a prisoner by a rope tied around his neck and liberate him; a drily funny scene in which Zapata meets Josefa's merchant-class family and indulges in a game of one-upmanship, cleverly trading platitudes with them to prove he is worthy of their daughter; and two separate assassination scenes, including the one that acts as the finale of the film, staged almost ritualistically. The film also contains several action sequences, such as the one in which Zapata and his men blow up an Army train to steal guns and ammunition, that show what a great director of action pictures or Westerns Kazan could have been had such subjects appealed to him. Although shot largely in Texas (it's unclear whether this was by choice or because of opposition by the Mexican government to filming in Mexico), Kazan and Fox house cinematographer Joe MacDonald give the film the authentic look of the sere landscape of northern Mexico. I do think, though, that the use of color, which Fox permitted for less artistically ambitious projects than this one, would have improved the film. The decision to film in black-and-white was likely by design, since at the time there was a prejudice that monochrome was more appropriate for serious films and color more suited to frivolous ones.

With such obvious strengths, why then am I so ambivalent towards the film as a whole? I think almost everything in the movie I can find to criticize stems from Steinbeck's muddled, unfocused screenplay. For one thing, the film labors under the curse of American movies of the 1950s—the desire to make a Statement. Yet for all its aspiration to significance, Viva Zapata! is remarkably vague about what it wants to say. Its overriding message seems to have something to do with the simplistic idea that power corrupts and the nebulous belief that the People are instinctively right and in the end will prevail over despotism, concepts expressed at regular intervals through didactic speechifying by the characters. The movie is noticeably short on specifics, however, and sidesteps difficult issues such as the role of the rule of law in a revolution or an examination of the moral limits of the use of force and violence to effect social and political change. Admittedly, it's likely the film avoids specifics partly because of the fearful climate of the early 1950s, when any sentiments that smacked of socialism or communism were not just suspect, but downright dangerous to anyone connected with the movie business. (Kazan appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee and "named names" in April 1952, shortly after Viva Zapata! was released.)

Another failing of the movie is to make the enemies of Zapata and the revolution such ponderously clichéd villains. This is especially true of Fernando Aguirre, the character played by Joseph Wiseman. Aguirre starts out as a sympathetic character and supporter of Zapata but soon becomes a wily provocateur, a sort of Iago figure whose motivations are completely mystifying. Wiseman's performance becomes progressively more mannered, until he is finally just a step away from Dr. No. At the end Aguirre even switches sides and without any explanation becomes Zapata's enemy, Judas to Zapata's Christ-like martyr, another element that steers the film away from clear-headed analysis and too close to unsubtle parable for my liking, a tendency that I find often compromises Steinbeck's fiction. Nor is the film helped by Steinbeck's heavy-handed symbolism—for instance, in the final scene Zapata's white horse running free in the mountains after his death, an obvious symbol of his indomitable spirit as an inspiration to his adoring followers. At the same time, I don't feel entirely comfortable with the romanticized portrayal of the noble Mexican peasants in the film. There is something patronizing in the portrayal of their naïve, childlike simplicity, their passivity that requires strong men of action to lead them, and their almost superstitious faith in messianic figures like Zapata.

I would sum up watching Viva Zapata! as a less than totally satisfying experience, one of admiring its best parts while feeling there is something lacking in the movie as a whole. This is a film designed to be held together by its themes, and those themes are simply not conveyed clearly or compellingly enough to do the job. In the end, despite the presence of Brando, I found Viva Zapata! not far removed from the conventional studio biopics of the 1930s and 1940s.