Elia Kazan (1952)

In the second half of the 1940s and well into the 1950s, Elia Kazan’s sustained creative output continued to include stage plays in addition to films.  Viva Zapata!’s immediate predecessor in Kazan’s filmography was A Streetcar Named Desire, which he’d had also directed when Tennessee Williams’s play first opened on Broadway four years earlier. In the year after Viva Zapata!’s release, Kazan was back there staging another Williams play, Camino Real, as well as preparing for On the Waterfront.

Seven years and seven features on from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, his Hollywood directing debut, Kazan was a fully-fledged film-maker.  Viva Zapata!, which dramatises the rise to power of the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, doesn’t strike you as the work of a man with his roots in theatre rather than cinema.  By now, Kazan was not only intent on location shooting (in Colorado, New Mexico and Texas) but eager to take on truly challenging landscape.  The large-scale scenes of mountain warfare are the most impressive element of this ambitious, uneven, dated film.

Kazan was evidently keen too to use Hispanic locals in non-speaking parts.  In itself, this works well.  Throughout the climax, when Zapata (Marlon Brando) is lured into an ambush and shot dead, Kazan punctuates the progress of the ambush with repeated cuts to the faces of two groups of Mexicans – elderly women and elderly men – who are looking on.  Their impassive silence contrasts sharply with the frantic movement at the centre of the action and the fusillade of gunfire that kills Zapata.  But the authenticity of the extras also serves to emphasise the artificial appearance of Caucasian members of the cast – especially Brando, with his not very good black wig and moustache, darkening face make-up, and taped-up eyelids (a combination that sometimes gives Zapata a confusingly oriental look.)

This isn’t an issue, of course, with Anthony Quinn, who was born in Chihuahua during the Mexican Revolution that the film depicts (his mother was Mexican and his father half-Mexican, half-Irish).  As the hero’s elder brother Eufemio, Quinn acts with a freedom that Brando has here only intermittently.  Quinn’s life force, which can be tiresome, is energising in Viva Zapata!   The impulsiveness and humour of the character he creates gives added poignancy to the heavy-drinking Eufemio’s eventual despair.  It would be unfair, though, not to give Brando his due.  To present-day audiences familiar with his full range of roles, his Mexican peasant freedom fighter can’t seem as remarkable as it must have been in 1952, when Brando had appeared in only two previous films (Fred Zinnemann’s The Men (1950) and Streetcar).  Yet his extraordinarily strong physical presence often gives Zapata a still startling immediacy.

Brando sometimes deflates his lines, sometimes gives them the quality of real, spontaneous thoughts.  The former tactic is understandable and the latter achievement close to miraculous because John Steinbeck’s dialogue is Viva Zapata!‘s most glaring and insistent defect.  According to Steinbeck, early twentieth-century Mexicans, regardless of their social class and position, spoke in epigrams.  In the opening scene, the country’s longstanding dictator Porfirio Díaz (Fay Roope) receives a delegation of peasant farmers and is told, ‘My President, we make our tortillas out of corn, not patience; and patience will not cross an armed and guarded fence’.  From this point on, the adages rarely stop.  Perhaps Steinbeck thought bombast appropriate to a commemoration of Zapata’s mythic status – something Kazan illustrates more successfully by visual rather than verbal means.  The hero’s white horse, a true survivor, appears finally as an embodiment of his people’s quasi-religious belief that Zapata isn’t really dead, that he’s living in the mountains (on high), from where he continues to inspire their struggle for freedom.

All the high-flown language is upstaged by the lines that conclude the scene of Zapata’s wedding night and provide the daftest moment of Viva Zapata!  His bride Josepa (Jean Peters) senses that something is troubling her husband and asks what it is.  He confesses that he’s illiterate and asks Josepa to teach him to read, starting right now.   Until this point, the two actors have played the bedroom scene admirably.  (Jean Peters, understandably awkward in a formal courtship sequence with Brando, is increasingly touching and credible in her limited role.)  Then Josepa gets down a Bible and reads aloud the opening verse of Genesis.  ‘In,’ says Zapata, without looking at the text.  ‘The,’ continues Josepa and he repeats the word.  This is an undeniably novel way of teaching someone to read but it’s a relief that Kazan cuts before Zapata gets to ‘beginning’.

6 February 2020