Villa Rides! (1968)
VILLA RIDES
How Peckinpah discovered his Bunch
Villa Rides is set in revolutionary Mexico and stars Yul
Brynner as Pancho Villa. To western fans it's best known as the movie that was not directed by Sam Peckinpah. He had
written the original script and was also set to direct, but he was fired after
he had clashed with Brynner about his portrayal of Villa.
Peckinpah was asked, by producer Ted Richmond, to adapt a Pancho Villa biography by William Douglas Lansford; he was asked to add an American character who got involved in the Mexican revolution because American audiences wouldn’t be interested in an ‘all Mexican’ action movie. Peckinpah first thought of a character like Ambrose Bierce, the journalist and author who had crossed the border to join Villa, but then discovered, while doing some historic research, that Villa had more than a hundred "Yanqui Soldados" riding with him, some of them idealists, most others mercenaries, outlaws or cowboys looking for a new line of work when the frontier was about to be closed.
Peckinpah's ‘Yanqui’ became a man
called Lee Arnold, a pilot using his plane to run guns with the so-called
Colorados, federal soldiers who are loyal to the dictator Porfirio Diaz. Arnold
is not really interested in the political turmoil but is forced to stay in
Mexico for a while when the landing gear of this plane must be repaired. The
village in which he is warmly welcomed (and finds a sweetheart) is then raided
by the Colorados, who execute several citizens before his eyes in gruesome
fashion. When he’s captured by Pancho Villa and his revolutionary forces, Villa
offers him a choice: aid the revolutionaries or die. While fighting alongside
the illiterate revolutionaries, Arnold slowly becomes a loyal supporter of the
people’s revolution.
(Text continues under the pic)
Some have suggested that Villa Rides was influenced by the Italian westerns, notably the Zapata westerns. Those ‘political’ westerns often featured a foreign professional who gave some technical and intellectual assistance to the illiterate Mexican revolutionary. But the Zapata westerns were European movies, reflecting some pseudo-Marxist ideas that were popular among European students and intellectuals during those 'Crazy Sixties'. Villa Rides was filmed in Europe, but it's an American production, reflecting typical American feelings of the decade. Played by Robert Mitchum, the 'foreigner' in Villa Rides is not a young man with a Sixties' moustache and whiskers (*1), but a man in his late forties, a cynical disillusioned person, with no real aim in his life. Peckinpah had the feeling there had been - and still were - many people in the US like Lee Arnold: confused, disillusioned, without direction.
Peckinpah's script was rather episodic in structure, but he
thought that he could remedy the shortcomings on the set. Yul Brynner saw other
problems. In the original script Villa watches impassively how a corral full of
prisoners are butchered and when he's about to be executed by the treacherous Huerta,
he breaks down and cries. Brynner thought this was the behavior of the villain,
not of the hero of a movie. He demanded another script and another director,
even though Peckinpah sent Brynner a note in which he asked for his suggestions
(*2). His script was rewritten by Robert Towne, who had co-scripted Bonnie & Clyde a year before and
would script Polanski’s Chinatown a
couple of years later. In the directional chair Peckinpah was replaced by Buzz
Kulik, who had mainly worked for television.
Villa Rides is not the great movie it was supposed to be, but it has several large-scale (and very violent) action sequences with hundreds of
extras that are well-staged and beautifully shot by Jack Hildyard, and the
score, by Maurice Jarre, is breathtaking, with a particularly memorable main
theme. Robert Mitchum (as the pilot) almost literally sleepwalks through the movie and Brynner is a man with a toupée who delivers his lines with a fake
accent, but Charles Bronson is at his sinister best as Pancho Villa’s
lieutenant Rodolfo Fierro; he’s also involved in the film’s most outrageous
scene, in which we witness him executing captured Colorados. It's quite an
excessive scene, even for a movie made in the late sixties, when violence was
taking over the genre. But it's also a scene taken from the history books:
Fierro was a ruthless, cold-blooded killer (*3).
In spite of Towne's rewritings, some of Peckinpah's
original plans shine through. There's a crucial scène in which Arnold learns
that his Mexican girlfriend was raped while Villa and his forces were biding
their time (in order to learn the villagers how to hate the Colorados). We’re
far removed from the idealism of the Zapata westerns in which noble peasants
were pitted against the brute forces of capitalism and colonialism. Villa is a
bandit, and his major redeeming quality is that he's loyal to his cause and
almost pays the highest possible price for investing too much faith in the
wrong people, such as the treacherous general Huerta.
Peckinpah felt very depressed after his dismissal from
Villa Rides. He thought he would never again be allowed to direct a movie. In
retrospect, Villa Rides seems an essential step towards The Wild Bunch. While working on Villa Rides, he learned that he could
infuse his vision about the end of the West with the idea of fortune seekers
and outlaws driven across the Mexican border (where warlords and rebel leaders
were willing to pay for their services) because they had become obsolete in
their own country. The leader of the bunch, Pike Bishop, shows some
similarities to both Arnold and Villa: he's a man past his prime, disenchanted,
but he loyal to his way of life and the men he's riding with.
.jpg){kind=small}
Notes:
 |
| Franco Nero |
(°1) In the Zapata westerns the European was often played by Italian actor Franco Nero, who looked more like a contemporary hippie than a mercenary from the times of the Mexican revolution.
(°2) David Weddle, If they move,
kill ‘m, p. 253. In the documentary Once Upon a Time Sergio Leone, it is
suggested – by producer Norbert Sadaa – that Sergio Leone was offered to direct
the movie but turned the offer down because he didn’t like the casting of Yul Brynner
in the role of Villa. I have not been able to find any conformation of Sadaa’s
words.
.jpg)
Comments
Post a Comment