***Country: US
Director: Elia Kazan
Viva Zapata! has all the earmarks of a studio prestige project. Marlon Brando's first movie after he created such a sensation in
A Streetcar Named Desire, it was directed by his
Streetcar director, Elia Kazan, during the heyday of Kazan's career and personally produced by the head of Twentieth Century-Fox, Darryl F. Zanuck. The screenplay was by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer John Steinbeck, who would receive the Nobel Prize for Literature ten years later. The film received five Oscar nominations (winning one—Anthony Quinn for best supporting actor), including one for best actor for Brando, who did win best actor awards at the Cannes Film Festival and from the British Academy. Given the formidable talent involved and the praise the film has received (David Thomson calls it "impressive" and "original"), it's one that I've looked forward to seeing for many years and was finally able to when it premiered on TCM recently. (It won't be available on DVD until next month.) I have to say, though, that despite all the care obviously lavished on it, my reaction is that this is a work of mixed quality that does not fully live up to its reputation.
Marlon Brando as Zapata in his bizarre-looking makeup
Set during the Mexican Revolution of the early 20th century, the film deals with the role in those events of Emiliano Zapata, an illiterate peasant who became one of the heroes of that revolution, the gravity of this subject another indication of the seriousness with which this project was approached by all involved. Brando is very good indeed in the title part (although I have to ask myself, "What were they thinking when they put him in that absurd makeup?"). He plays Zapata very quietly, almost meekly in one of his most subtle, least affected performances. This is a man in conflict, yet Brando conveys that conflict less as externalized turmoil than as internalized confusion. Zapata is no zealot, but an uncomplicated man who, because others admire the way he speaks his mind and acts on the strength of his convictions, is called upon to become a leader. He does reluctantly accept that role, allowing circumstances to direct him into a course of action he does not feel naturally suited for. But unlike nearly everyone else in the film, his ideals are not subverted by the power he finds himself wielding, and he eventually forgoes that power because he cannot accept the inevitable necessity to compromise his principles. In the end, though, he finds that the simple people he loves will not allow him to remain in retirement and that he must sacrifice his own desires, and eventually his life, to give the people what they need. Like so many of Steinbeck's heroes, he becomes a martyr. Brando, however, manages to avoid the sanctimony and self-righteousness that are the pitfalls of such a contrivance, stoically accepting that he must put aside his own welfare for the common good.
If I hadn't already known that America, America was directed by Elia Kazan, I doubt that I ever would have guessed it, so different is this picture from anything else by Kazan I've seen. Kazan used unfamiliar actors and technicians for the film—it was photographed by Haskell Wexler and edited by Dede Allen, both little known at the time but within a few years to become luminaries in their fields—and shot it almost entirely in Greece and Turkey. With its location shooting, cast of unknowns, use of the hand-held camera, and post-sync sound recording, it has a distinctly European feel, almost in the tradition of Italian neorealism. The thing which most sets it apart from the rest of Kazan's work, though, is its screenplay. Kazan is known for his masterful interpretation of screenplays written by other people—Tennessee Williams, William Inge, John Steinbeck, Budd Schulberg for example—to which according to Kazan he often made uncredited contributions, but America, America was the first picture he conceived and wrote by himself. In his 1988 autobiography, Kazan explains how, nearly twenty years into his career as a film director, he came to the decision to write his first screenplay: "In someone else's hands, it would lose its flavor. I'd grown up in that environment, remembered every sight, sound, smell, and taste. . . . I had to write that screenplay myself."
