Viva Villa

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Buy This Item Viva Villa by MGM (Warner)  Available from Amazon  $14.98  on 11-26-2008     Wallace Beery stars in this surprisingly raw, graphically violent (and yet, somehow somewhat sentimentalized) Hollywood version of the life of Pancho Villa, one of the leaders of the Mexican Revolution. Character actor Leo Carillo, infamous as a latino Uncle Tom for his portrayal as Pancho in the "Ceesco Keed" series, here costars as Sierra, Villa's blandly sadistic lieutenant, and Faye Wray appears as an aristocratic lady who catches Villa's fancy. Ben Hecht's sharp, no-nonsense script is politically left-leaning, and while it takes liberties with its depictation of Villa as a brutish lout with a heart of gold, Beery's performance sheds unexpected nuance Basically, he's transposing his loveable-mug boxer persona onto the Mexican landscape, but in a weird way, it almost works. Apparently this film had a stop-and-start shooting history, with three directors (Howard Hawks and William Wellman worked on it, but didn't wind up in the final credits) and some extensive recasting as well; James Wong Howe provides some typically fine B&W cinematography. A dynamic classic old film, with a relatively sympathetic presentation of the Latin American peasantry Worth checking out, even though the racial aspects of the film are at times dubious. Reader Reviews Articles refer to the scene where Fay Wray's character is whipped while she laughs and claim that it was edited because of the newly enforced Production Code in July 1934. This is not accurate. In the 1960s, on either New York channel WNEW 5 or WCBS 2, that scene was shown regularly whenever "Viva Villa" was aired. There was also an additional scene showing Leo Carillo's character lining up 3 federal troops at a time, front to back, and shooting them with one bullet to save ammunition. Both scenes are edited out from the Turner Classics print, but they do exist and thus allow for the possibility of the film eventually being restored.

Viva Villa Available from Amazon Price: $14.98 Updated on 11-26-2008.

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