Viva Zapata! (1952)
Emiliano Zapata, Mexican revolutionary leader, is about to lead a revolution in Mexico.
Viva Zapata! covers the rise and fall of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata (Marlon Brando1). This is a good idea for a movie, as the Mexican Revolution (1910 - 1917) was a fascinating, turbulent time in Mexico’s history. Moreover, Zapata himself was a complex character who witnessed how various dictatorships, coups, revolutions, and counter-revolutions all failed to achieve his goal of land reform for the peasantry. The message of the film—that our leaders are fallible and that a nation best supports itself on the strength of its populace—is one worth telling. It’s too bad that this message is only depicted through Marlon Brando mumbling it at the camera.
This is a movie that treats the prosaic work of storytelling with utter disdain. The narrative is often difficult to follow, with basic questions like “what are Zapata’s objectives?” and “who is he fighting?” typically left unanswered. Zapata himself rarely does anything that moves the plot along, while undue attention is given to his wooing of Josefa (Jean Peters) and to him yelling about how he can’t read2—the two least interesting pieces of the movie.
This is our second time seeing Marlon Brando in this column. I liked his hulking, shouty performance in A Streetcar Named Desire, but he’s awful here. Every scene is the same: Brando juts out his lips, crosses his eyes, and mutters his lines. He’s both unsympathetic and uninteresting and you never once believe him as a leader of men.
I want to acknowledge that this isn’t some forgotten movie, like Bright Victory. This is a real movie that real people liked. It was John McCain’s favorite movie! That means there’s something to it and I want you to know that I take that seriously.
Rating: 2/10, this movie sucks.
Cast and Crew
Jean Peters, who plays Zapata’s love interest, was well known for her starring role in the 1953 noir Pickup on South Street. She had a short Hollywood career, but you can tell what she was most famous for from the name of her biography: “Mrs. Howard Hughes.” She was married to the billionaire Hughes from 1957 until their divorce in 1971.3
Anthony Quinn, as Zapata’s brother Eufemio, is cartoonishly villainous by the end of the movie, but somehow he won an Oscar for his performance.
Quinn had a long, rich career in Hollywood, so let’s look at some of his highlights up to 1952. His first role, uncredited in 1936’s The Milky Way4, was with silent-screen star Harold Lloyd. We won’t get a chance to talk about Lloyd, but you should know his famous scene in 1923’s Safety Last! where he hangs from a clock face.
Quinn had dozens of roles through 1930s and ‘40s Hollywood, often playing “the other” (Spanish, Mexican, Native American, Hawaiian, Filipino, Chinese) in movies with luminaries such as Bing Crosby & Bob Hope5, John Wayne, and Anna May Wong. Some other highlights:
They Died With Their Boots On (1941), about the life of George Armstrong Custer. Custer is played by Errol Flynn across from love interest Olivia de Havilland in the last of their eight movies together. Quinn plays Crazy Horse.
The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), starring Henry Fonda. Quinn plays a Mexican mistakenly lynched for cattle rustlin’.
Anthony Quinn’ll be in the column a bunch more times, adding Italian, Greek, and Arabian to his list of ethnicities played. He’ll also be a lot better than he was in Zapata.
Viva Zapata! was directed by Elia Kazan (director of Streetcar), but we’ve already decided to punt our discussion of him to 1954. Similarly, John Steinbeck, the famed California novelist, is responsible for the screenplay for Viva Zapata!, but we’ll cover him when one of his novels is adapted to the screen in 1955.
The Trivia
Porfirio Díaz, Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa, Francisco Madero, General Victoriano Huerta: these are all guys you need to know.6
Porfirio Díaz, who is the president of Mexico at the outset of Viva Zapata!, ruled as a de facto dictator from 1876 to 1911 (a period known as the Porfiriato). Prior to his presidency, he was a general at the May 5th, 1862 Battle of Puebla7 against the French. Once Benito Juarez, the first indigenous Mexican president, was elected, Díaz aligned against him, eventually launching a coup against Juarez’ successor. Díaz’s presidency saw stability and economic growth, but that growth was at the expense of the peasantry—the group Zapata represented. It was against the backdrop of economic inequality and undemocratic institutions that the Mexican Revolution began.
Francisco Madero opposed Díaz in the rigged 1910 election, first getting imprisoned, then escaping to the U.S. where he put forth the Plan of San Luis Potosí. This plan suggested people rise up against Díaz on November 20th (now celebrated as Revolution Day in Mexico). One revolution later, Madero ended up as president…well, until a U.S.-backed coup led by General Victoriano Huerta started the Ten Tragic Days, where both Madero and his brother were murdered. Huerta wasn’t the end of the struggle, however.
Emiliano Zapata, from the state of Morelos, had allied with Madero in hopes of achieving land reforms—specifically, redistributing the land from the haciendas to the peasants of the villages. When Madero became president, though, he denounced Zapata’s troops as bandits—big mistake! Zapata took up arms against Madero and continued fighting after Huerta’s coup, throwing his lot in with Pancho Villa8 and Venustiano Carranza. Villa, Carranza, and Zapata successfully ousted Huerta, but that wasn’t the end of the struggle either….
…because it led to a civil war between Villa’s Conventionalist Army and Carranza’s Constitutionalist Army. After Villa was defeated, Carranza sought to flush out Zapata, who was back in Morelos. Then Zapata was killed in an ambush.
Woof. One can see why Steinbeck’s message in Viva Zapata! was how freedom can’t be top-down. It’s summed up at the end of the movie:
You always look for leaders, strong men without faults. There aren’t any. There are only men like yourselves. They change. They desert. They die. There are no leaders but yourselves. A strong people is the only lasting strength.
It’s a powerful idea, one made more tangible from the actual events in Mexican history. Too bad the movie sucked.
Also, Emiliano Zapata COULD read, as is pointed out in this takedown of the film from The Guardian.
Note that actress Terry Moore was secretly married to Hughes in the ‘40s and they never divorced. It seems the Hughes estate considered Moore Hughes’ lawful wife after Hughes died.
Look, this is a trivia blog and no one cares about The Milky Way, but it has the perfect screwball plot. A milkman appears to knock out the world middleweight champion in a brawl. A boxing promotor then sets him up to win a bunch of fixed fights, leading to a climax where he’s supposed to take a dive in the world championship—but he doesn’t! Instead the milkman fights and, against all odds, wins!! I’m not going to watch it because I’ve got like 300 more Best Actor movies ahead of me but, like, I would if I could.
Both separately and, in Road to Singapore and Road to Morocco, together.
And the NAQT agrees. The linked article was one of the first things I read when I started getting serious about trivia and it has had an incredibly high return on investment.
Note the date; that’s what Cinco de Mayo celebrates. As pedants tell you once every year, Mexican Independence is actually celebrated on September 16th, which commemorates Miguel Hidalgo’s “Grito de Dolores,” which called for rebellion against Spanish rule.
Though questions about Zapata and Villa can feel like coin flips, you’ll nail them all if you just remember that Zapata was active in the South and cared about land reform while Villa was active in the North. Also, Villa invaded Columbus, NM, and was chased back into Mexico by John J. Pershing.