Beau Bandit

"Beau Ideal" is a film that wouldn't play very well today, as it features a white actor, Rod La Rocque, playing a Mexican bandit...and with a very strange accent to boot. As for me, what bothered me more is that the film was incredibly talky...something not all that surprising since many early talkies really accentuated talking instead of action and plot.

When the story begins, a local boss tries to hire the bandit, Montero (Rod La Rocque) to murder an enemy. However, Montero is a very odd guy and instead of killing his quarry, he tells him about the plan to pay him for murdering the guy! It's obvious Montero isn't that bad a guy after all....and soon he'll be turning the tides on this boss.

The film was slow...glacially slow. It also is quite talky and has little in the way of action. It's not a totally bad movie...occasionally it's a bit funny...but mostly it's a dull film that would have been better had they made it a year or two later when talking wasn't seen as the ultimate form of storytelling in films.

By the way, Montero supposedly has a deaf sidekick but again and again, I noticed that Montero didn't always look at the guy when he talked and he never used sign language. Speech reading (the phrase deaf people use for 'lip reading') is a very, very inexact art and few deaf folks can do it well...but none of them can do it when they aren't even looking at the speaker! They're deaf...not psychics!

If one realizes that this is a parody then all is well. Mr. La Rocque reprises his role from "The Delightful Rogue" (1929). This film is over 90 years old so of course it is not sophisticated by today's standards. Lots to enjoy here - the California desert, Emperor Ming before he was promoted, Tom Keene before he was Tom Keene, and the always delightful Doris Kenyon. Comparable to the giant budget westerns of that era? Certainly not but still a lot of fun.

Lambert Hillyer was a western specialist who directed everyone from William S. Hart to Buck Jones; although not in the same league as Ford, Peckinpah, Anthony Mann and other western icons, Hillyer could usually be counted upon to add some distinctive touches to his films that would often overcome the restrictions of limited budgets, lame scripts and sub-par performances. Unfortunately, though this film does have some interesting visuals, they're not enough to overcome the hack plot and the absolutely atrocious performance of Rod LaRocque, a former silent matinée idol. LaRocque plays Montero, a "dashing" Mexican bandit who, along with his sidekick--a hulking deaf mute named Colosso--rides into town intent on robbing the local bank. He's distracted from his task by the plight of a beautiful local girl who's in love with a poor farmer but is pursued by the evil owner of the bank Montero has come to rob. A lame premise, to be sure, and one more suited to an overheated silent-era melodrama, but whatever possibilities it may have had are ruined by LaRocque's appalling performance. His idea of "dashing" is to paste a permanent smirk on his face that brings to mind the worst excesses of Tom Cruise; as if that isn't annoying enough, LaRocque came up with what is undoubtedly the worst Mexican "accent" in the history of film. He doesn't even TRY to come close to an authentic one; every so often he'll say "weel" instead of "will" and "mew-zeek"--which is actually a French pronunciation, not Spanish!--instead of "music" in his own flat, nasal Midwestern accent. At first it's simply distracting, but combined with that irritating smirk and the insipid dialog, it soon becomes annoying, then maddening. Hillyer's imagination is evident at the beginning of the film, in a nice, moody shot of a posse emerging from a foggy river crossing, but it's all downhill from there. Not much action, several miscast roles (Walter Long, usually great as a tough prison inmate or big-city gangster, is wildly out of place as the head of the posse), and supporting performances almost as bad as LaRocque's doom this picture to instant forgettability.

Doris Kenyon and Tom Keene want to get married, but Charles Middleton wants her too. When dread Mexican bandit Rod La Rocque -- who hailed from Chicago -- rides into town looking for a bank to rob, Middleton offers him $1250 to kill his rival and leave the way clear for him. La Rocque, however, has a peculiar way of conducting business.

Charming and eccentric Mexican bandits were all the rage since In Old Arizona had won Warner Baxter -- who came from Columbus, Ohio -- an Oscar for playing the Cisco Kid. La Rocque is amusing, even though I found his "Speedy Gonzalez" accent and slow, slow delivery, tiresome. Mitchell Lewis plays La Rocque's sidekick -- he came from Syracuse New York -- but he doesn't have a line, so his Mexican accent doesn't come up.

The print I saw was pretty good in the sound department for the outdoors scenes, although the studio sequences were buzzy.