#631: And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself
Not revolutionary, but certainly fun
Initial release: September 7, 2003
Director: Bruce Beresford
There’s always two sides to historical figures. Nobunaga Oda was a master tactician who helped unify Japan, but he was also notorious for his brutality. Vlad Tepes is a national hero of Romania — and his habit of impaling his enemies formed the basis of the Dracula legend. Christopher Columbus’ reputation has increasingly frayed as we grapple more with the legacy of colonialism and slavery that he kicked off. And let’s not even get into the American Founding Fathers or quite a few of our presidents… And then there’s Pancho Villa. Today he enjoys an interestingly mixed reputation as both Mexican national hero and shameless bandit; however one might see him (and I suspect a lot of that is informed by one’s tendency towards libertarian or authoritarian worldviews) he is unquestionably the most famous figure of the Mexican Revolution of the early twentieth century. Rising up from murky origins, he helped oust the unpopular Porfiro Diaz in 1911, but when Diaz’s successor, Francisco Madero, was assassinated in a coup by Victoriano Huerta, who presided over a proto-fascist dictatorship worse than Diaz could ever dream of, Villa became the very public face of a popular revolution. Which brings us to Bruce Beresford’s made-for-HBO flick, And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself.
Starring Pancho Villa is one of those silly self-referential movies I enjoy; I’m a big sucker for movies about the filmmaking process, because there’s an earnestness to them you don’t see much. Even Shadow of the Vampire — a very fictionalized depiction of the filming of the 1922 classic Nosferatu — feels authentic in its clearly being more of a metaphor for the relationship between Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski while filming the 1979 remake. Starring Pancho Villa isn’t so fantastical as to depict its primary character as a real vampire, though there’s certainly an element of, if not villainy then grey morality.
The plot — and my half-assed research suggests the actual events depicted didn’t play out too differently — goes like this: revolutions need money, money needs recognition, and Villa, a rather self-aggrandizing figure, serves as his own publicist, inviting famous filmmaker D.W. Griffith (the guy who would later go on to make the infamous Birth of a Nation) to come down to Mexico and capture the revolution on film for American audiences, who might not fully understand the nature of what was going on south of the border (especially given that Huerta was installed by the US ambassador to Mexico!) Griffith’s actual involvement is unclear, and likely he just put his name on it; whatever the case, the resulting film, a mix of staged dramatization and real-life battle scenes (possibly the first film to incorporate actual combat footage into a dramatic story, beating out Abel Gance’s J’Accuse! by about 5 years) would be called The Life of General Villa. Of course, while this is on paper about the production of that film, what it’s really about is Pancho Villa himself. (There aren’t a lot of Villa biopics that I’ve been able to find; this is probably the one big English-language one.)
To a lesser extent, it’s also about his relationship with Frank N. Thayer, the nephew of Mutual Films studio exec Harry Aitkin. Thayer is in charge of the film crew as they capture the battle scenes; over the course of the film he evolves from a rather timid greenhorn to a tough professional willing to stand up to Villa. Thayer is in essence the audience surrogate; when we see Villa, we’re essentially seeing him through Thayer’s eyes. It’s Thayer who convinces Villa that dramatizing the revolution a bit — making it more palatable for American audiences — will be more effective than a messy documentarian approach. They get Raoul Walsh to play Villa in his prime, and Villa himself appears in the final scene as an imaginary post-revolution president of Mexico — something Villa himself found offensive, but was willing to play along for propaganda purposes.
Despite the time period and Mexican setting this isn’t a Zapata western, or really a western at all. It’s a film about filmmaking, about propaganda, and ultimately about the human faces behind national mythmaking. If anything, the film’s color grading says a lot about what kind of movie it is, or at least when it was made: sequences shot in Mexico tend towards more naturalistic, slightly yellow grading (not as bad as Breaking Bad, but definitely noticeable) and scenes in America, specifically New York, have such coldly blue color grading it’s almost monochromatic.
Villa, played masterfully by Antonio Banderas, is a zephyrous character, full of passion and fury, prone to cruel practical jokes and fits of rage in between grandstanding and outright heroism. Far from being some sort of mythical hero, he’s unambiguously human, larger-than-life and yet at times quite small and petty. Thayer, played by Eion Bailey (who at this point in his career looked like a wish.com Paul Rudd) isn’t quite as dynamic; his performance is evenhanded and solid, but even if he wanted to stand out he’d still be in the shadow of Banderas. We also get, as a treat, Alan Arkin as Sam Dreben, the Jewish-American war hero, two-time US Army trooper and mercenary who spent a lot of time on a lot of battlefields including those of the Mexican Revolution.
Starring Pancho Villa is absolutely what you would expect from an early-00s HBO TV movie: technically competent with some good composition and editing, decent script and acting, but hardly revolutionary. Nevertheless, it’s fun to watch Banderas bounce off the walls. While we’ll probably never be able to sort fact from fiction from meta-fiction — after all, this is a movie that dramatizes the production of another movie that nobody has seen in a century that dramatizes a real historical event whose participants are all dead now — it’s still an interesting look at an otherwise unseen slice of film and revolutionary history. Americans would rather watch something than read something, a character points out; it feels weirdly prescient, watching this relatively new medium be used in such a way to influence popular opinion, and I think of social media, the way Facebook and Twitter and Tiktok all play a role in the politics of today. What would Villa have thought of Tiktok? He’d probably be all over it.
