Viva Zapata!

Marlon Brando was one of the people honored this past August in Summer Under the Stars. I already blogged about one of the movies TCM ran that day, The Missouri Breaks. Another that I hadn't blogged about before is Viva Zapata!. Recently, I sat down to watch it and do a review on it here.

Brando plays Emiliano Zapata, who in the movie is presented as a peasant from southern Mexico. In Mexico, as in a lot of other Latin American countries, the question of who holds title to the land is a vexing one, as the land had been given to gentry by Spain before the countries became independent. (This is the main plot point of the biographical film The Baron of Arizona, a movie that I have apparently never done a full-length post on.) The peasants planted what they believe is their land, but wealthy planters came along and abrogated those land right. So Emiliano leads a bunch of peasants to Mexico City to see the President, Porfirio Diaz.

Diaz is a dictator, having led the country for thirty-some years, and he fobs off the peasants by telling them this is an issue that takes time, time that the peasants feel they don't have because they need to plant crops at a set time and harvest them at another set time. All Zapata has done for himself is make some very powerful enemies. Indeed, when Zapata and his fellow peasants try to survey what they think is their land, Diaz sends out the army! So Emiliano and his brother Eufemio (Anthony Quinn) lead a bunch of men into the mountain forests to become a sort of Mexican Robin Hood-type band of outlaws and revolutionaries.

Writer and committed revolutionary Fernando Aguirre (Joseph Wiseman) is able to find Zapata and suggest that he team up with other forces trying to rid Mexico of the malignant presence of Diaz, as it will be more difficult for Diaz to deal with multiple fronts. As for the Zapata of this movie, all he wants is his rightful land as well has the woman he loves, Josefa Espejo (Jean Peters). Josefa's dad is none too happy with this, as he doesn't want his daughter to marry an illiterate peasant, he being a modestly well-off shopkeeper. Eventually, of course, Emiliano is going to win Josefa's dad over.

Getting back to the political situation, it's becoming increasingly complicated as one of those exiled intellectuals is hoping to become the new leader after Diaz is deposed, and he's using his surrogates in Mexico -- Pancho Villa in the north, and Zapata in the south -- to lead those revolutions. Diaz is eventually overthrown, and the question of what to do next comes up.

Zapata is a logical candidate, as he's seen to be more modest in his ambitions than the other revolutionaries. However, as in a movie like Crisis, a lot of the other revolutionaries aren't as modest, and they quickly become as corrupt as the people they just replaced. This includes Emiliano's own brother. Emiliano would still like to be with his wife, but politics just won't let him, and eventually he's seen as too important to be left alive.

I don't know how much Viva Zapata! comports with what really happened in Mexico in that turbulent decade, although the characterization of Zapata as virtuously modest struck me as phony. (Indeed, Wikipedia says the part about him being illiterate and taught to read by Josefa is untrue.) Marlon Brando is not my favorite actor, although people who like him will probably enjoy his performance more than I did. Quinn gives a good performance that earned him the Oscar for Supporting Actor.

Overall, Viva Zapata! is a movie that runs in the grand Hollywood tradition of hagiographic biopics that don't play completely fair with the truth. I generally don't care that biopics be 100% accurate, as long as the desire to put the subject in a certain light (either positive or negative) doesn't overpower the rest of the story. Unfortunately, Viva Zapata! comes fairly close to that line, leaving it a mixed bag as some of the supporting performances and the direction are quite good.