Che!

If you're looking for an accurate portrayal of Che Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary who helped aid Fidel Castro in his bid for power, you'd better read up on Cuban history or even type in his name on a search engine (you ARE on the Internet, after all).

But whatever you do, DO NOT WATCH "CHE!".

Unless, of course, you just want a good laugh.

All the reviewers of the time (and moviegoers) gave "Che!" their vote for worst film of the decade. And no wonder; have you seen this travesty? Its facts are tenuous at best, Sharif is even unconvincing as a corpse and as for Palance's Fidel Catsro imitation....

Like I said, if you want a good laugh.

It's like watching a co-production between The Learning Channel and Mad Magazine.

One star.

I wonder if Palance can do W. C. Fields, too?

This film was almost hooted into oblivion by the critics at the time of its release, so when I saw it on one of the Cinemax channels last night, I was surprised that it wasn't much worse. A few months ago I saw the highly acclaimed docudrama on Fidel on Showtime, and this film, while not as good as the Showtime drama, is not all that much worse either.

First the bad stuff. Jack Palance's portrayal of Fidel Castro must rank as one of the worst performances ever to appear on screen. During the first half of the film, he spends most of the time rolling a lit cigar around in his mouth and making weird facial grimaces, most of which he seems to have forgotten by the second half. Moreover, he makes Castro come across as a dim-witted doofus who is always helped to see the right course by the brilliant Che, rather than portraying Castro as the brilliant strategist and tactician he was. Secondly, although the film is in English, much of the spoken dialogue sounds like a dubbed movie. Maybe that's because one of the principal supporting actors is Italian.

That having been said, the film's history is, quite surprisingly, fairly accurate. It accurately depicts how Castro's forces were almost completely wiped out after the arrival from Mexico, and Castro was left with a force numbering less than twenty. Nevertheless, he survives and gradually wins the support of the peasants, so that eventually he has a guerrilla force numbering in the thousands. The fact that Guevara was unable to pull off the same feat in Bolivia, due largely to his own megalomania that prevented his listening to the Bolivian peasants, is accurately portrayed as well. This isn't available on video and isn't likely to come to a theater, so you can probably see it only on cable. If it comes along, it's worth a watch.

How could this movie work as a factual representation or artistic vision?

1) it comes at the height of an anti-Castro obsession this country had and in many ways, still does (see, the US liked the harshly oppressive Cuban Government that preceded Castro, because we were allowed to profit from it's fascism). The very tagline of the movie shows one of it's main objectives - to paint Castro or at least his economic model as cartoonish villainy.

2) The Hollywood of the time not wanting to go to the risk of having actual Cubans or even people of closely related nationalities in the leading roles, we have very American leading men doing laughable Cuban impressions. Jack Palance as Fidel Castro? Thankfully this tradition has broken so we never saw Nicholas Cage as Malcom X.

3) Facts are of no concern to the filmmakers.

It does, however, have my recommendation - as a spectacle (it is an interesting one), but hardly as a decent piece of cinema.

I saw this picture many years ago at its premiere and I never had a chance to see it again, but I would like to say something about it. First of all, Richard Fleischer is a distinguished director. See, for instance, "The Vikings", maybe the best adventure movie ever, or "Compulsion", a thrilling and alluring criminal drama. The problem with "Che!" is that it deals with too many facts and subjects in the while of 80 or 90 minutes. A lot of things are kept off-screen. Besides,the actors are completely unsuitable and the screenplay is poor. Characters and History itself is unfold in a distorted manner; so that, people who know a bit about Cuban Revolution fall disappointed. The movie grows better in the second half when Che tries to lead a guerrilla party in Bolivia. I still remember the last sequence showing a bedraggled and crippled Guevara, minutes before his decease, sitting on the floor of a schoolroom. A Bolivian Army officer calls in a village goat-herder , points towards wretched Guevara and asks the peasant : "Can't you see ? he has come here to free you!" The herder seems astonished, stares at the two men for a while and utters at last :"To free me ??? Since these people have shown up, shooting haphazardly, the goats have grown frightened , their milk dried and we have nothing to feed our children! So ... is this to free us ?" Next, Guevara raises and walks lamely towards the wall outside the door. Before him a firing squad is waiting. I don't know why, but I always fancy Guevara's last stand as depicted in this ill-fated flick.

Richard Fleischer's biopic about the eponymous Argentinian revolutionary has been widely known as one of the biggest embarrassments in cinema history. Watching "Che!", I didn't interpret it as a particularly bad movie. What it is: extremely corny. As I understand it, the movie is historically accurate. It's just that, aside from all the overacting, Omar Sharif as Che Guevara looks silly and Jack Palance as Fidel Castro always looks as if he's about to fall asleep. In fact, Fidel adopts Che's comments as his own, just like Daffy Duck does with Porky Pig's suggestion in "Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2 Century"! There has been news of Steven Soderbergh's upcoming biopic about Che Guevara, with Benicio Del Toro playing the role. It'll probably come out better than this one. This mostly functions as an example of a movie intended as serious coming out really funny. Worth seeing for that.

Also starring Cesare Danova (Mayor Carmine in "Animal House"), Woody Strode and Barbara Luna.