Viva Zapata! (1952)

Viva Zapata! is an American war film first released in 1952, directed by Elia Kazan.  The film stars Marlon Brando, Jean Peters, Anthony Quinn, Joseph Wiseman and Arnold Moss.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


In 1909, the Mexican President, Porfirio Díaz, is visited by a delegation of peasants who complain that their land has been illegally taken from them.  Díaz’s recommendation for the peasants to register a formal complaint and follow the process of the law provokes a hostile response from one of the peasants, a young hothead named Emiliano Zapata.  Assisted by his brother Eufemio, Zapata drives his people to open rebellion.  Díaz is toppled and replaced by the reformer Francisco Madero.  Having secured for himself a stake in the running of his country, Zapata soon becomes disillusioned when he learns that nothing has really changed.  His people are still led by a corrupt government that has little interest in the problems of the poor.  By resigning his position, Zapata sends a clear signal to his former associates that he has become a dangerous threat, a threat that must be disposed of...

It was during the recording of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) that director Elia Kazan approached his star Marlon Brando with a view to making another film, on a subject that could not have been further from the Tennessee Williams play.  Both Kazan and the novelist John Steinbeck wanted to make a historical drama about the legendary Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, who played a central role in the Mexican Revolution of 1910.  Kazan and Steinbeck’s motivation was not to attempt an accurate account of Zapata’s life but rather to make an overt attack on Stalinism, which they both saw as a betrayal of Communism.  The central theme of the film would be how men could start out with honest motives but end up becoming totally corrupted by the power they win for themselves.  Zapata represented an ideal, the mythical hero who would resist corruption and walk away from power when he realised how little it could achieve, in contrast to Stalin, who, in Kazan’s mind, epitomised the exact opposite.  In pursuing this crude allegory, Kazan and Steinbeck did a spectacular whitewashing job on the real-life Zapata, to the extent that their film’s portrayal of the revolutionary bares scant resemblance to the brutal fanatic who is reputed to have carried out over a thousand executions during his campaign of terror.

Given the astronomical liberties that the film’s director and writer took with Zapata’s life story, it hardly matters that the actor playing Zapata bore absolutely no resemblance to him.  Make-up artist Phil Rhodes did a marvellous job of altering Marlon Brando’s appearance to the extent that he resembled a native Mexican, and the actor did the rest - he was in fact the only member of the cast who bothered to master a Spanish accent (which he did by spending several weeks in a remote Mexican village).  Cast opposite Brando in the role of Zapata’s brother was Anthony Quinn, the very actor who had replaced him in the successful Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire.  The two actors had a difficult working relationship, although they did break the ice by periodically walking off from the location set together and partaking in pissing contests, seeing who could project their urine the furthest. 

To heighten the realism of the pivotal scene in which the two Zapata brothers come to blows, Kazan stoked up antagonism between Quinn and Brando by telling each of them separately that the other had boasted he was the better performer in the Streetcar production.  Although Brando was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Zapata, he came away empty handed, whilst Quinn took the Oscar for the Best Supporting Actor.   Brando had to content himself with the Best Actor award at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival.  Such is the exceptional quality of the performances from both Brando and Quinn - sensitive and nuanced portrayals of a pair of fanatical paranoiacs - that they virtually eclipse the contributions of the other actors.   The only other performance of note is that of Harold Gordon, whose Francisco Madero is probably the film’s most historically accurate portrayal.

Whilst it is a beautifully crafted piece of cinema, as intelligently scripted and imaginatively photographed as any other Elia Kazan film, Viva Zapata! offers only the crudest of approximations to real historical events.  Not only does the film take enormous liberties with its central character, casting Zapata as an illiterate, monogomistic and incorruptible hero (which is wrong on at least three counts), but it also massively simplifies the details of the Mexican Revolution (reducing Pancho Villa’s contribution to a footnote).  Viewed, however, in the terms which Kazan intended, as a metaphor for the corrupting influence of power, the film is extremely effective.  Zapata’s unwillingness to seize power for his own advantage strangely echoes Brando’s reluctance to play the part of the conventional Hollywood star - both were motivated by far more complex motives than a mere desire for personal glory.

© Steve Chandler 2011

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