Villa Rides

First time I saw this movie I thought it was excellent, I was about twelve then. I still have a fondness for it, and will watch it whenever I find it on t.v.

I am not a student of Mexican history, nor do I pretend to be, but I enjoyed it, and will watch it again all over. If you are looking for a life changing event then this is not it,(really if you want to change your life then get off of the couch, movies are not life, not even a substitute, go out, meet someone, have a fling, live a LIFE) if you want an amusing hour and a half, then this should do the job for you.

What more can you you want from a movie?

So far I haven't seen one film about Pancho Villa that got it right and Villa Rides is definitely one of them. Perhaps the proposed biographical film that Johnny Depp will star in might do Villa some justice.

Yul Brynner and Robert Mitchum co-star in Villa Rides with Brynner in the title role. Mitchum plays your typical soldier of fortune although in his case he's a pilot of fortune. He's a pilot of one of those new fangled airplanes and it is through his eyes we see the story of the film unfold.

A damaged aircraft delays Mitchum in Mexico after making a delivery and before he knows it, he's hip deep in the revolution that is going on in Mexico. At this point in his career Villa is one of several guerrilla chiefs supporting the new republic and the presidency of the idealistic Francisco Madero played here by Alexander Knox. Madero himself was a strange and fascinating character, one day he might get a biographical film study of his tragic life.

The Mexican Revolution of the teen years saw the country give way to anarchy with Villa eventually becoming one of several generalissimos controlling a piece of Mexican turf. As Villa operated in the extreme north of the country it was his bad fortune to later on raid into the USA and get Woodrow Wilson to send our army after him.

Here at the beginning Villa though after Mitchum talks his way into not being shot by his forces, Brynner sees the value of Mitchum's airplane as a weapon of war. He puts one of his aides Charles Bronson to ride herd on Mitchum and the two of them don't get along at all.

According to Lee Server's book on Mitchum they didn't get along all that well during the filming. Another Mitchum, brother John Mitchum wrote in his memoirs that Bronson was a very reserved sort who guarded his privacy strictly. They apparently had no problem on the set of Bronson's film Breakheart Pass which John Mitchum had a small part.

Mitchum and Brynner got along however which was not always the case with Brynner. Yul Brynner was a man of some mystery who liked it that way, he was and could be standoffish with fellow players, but apparently he and Mitchum worked well together in their only joint film.

The film was shot in Spain and I have to say the battle sequences were very well staged. They are the best part of Villa Rides.

A good, but not a great film. I do have to wonder that when Black Jack Pershing came into Mexico later on after the action of this film concluded, might not Mitchum be in a real jackpot fighting against the American army at that point.

Released in 1968, "Villa Rides" stars Robert Mitchum as a Texas pilot/gunrunner who is thrust into the Mexican Revolution by his own greed. After being disillusioned by the Colorados (Orozquistas), he hooks up with bandit-turned-nationalist Pancho Villa (Yul Brynner) & his hardened patriots to face off against the Colorados in Northern Mexico. Charles Bronson and Robert Viharo play Villa's grim and merry assistants respectively while Maria Grazia Buccella is on hand as a woman that strikes the pilot's fancy. Herbert Lom appears as an enemy general while Alexander Knox plays naïve President Madero. Jill Ireland has a small role at the end.

Sam Peckinpah wrote the original screenplay and was slated to direct, but Brynner felt the script made Villa out to be too harsh, so Yul used his pull to get Robert Towne to rewrite it and the producers pursued another director, ending up with Buzz Kulik.

While this is more historical fiction than reality, it does successfully bring you back in time to the Mexican Revolution and helps you envision what it must have been like to ride with the legendary Villa. The movie definitely has more credibility than the incongruously-toned "Pancho Villa" (1972) with Telly Savalas in the titular role (although that Western is worth catching just for Villa's "invasion" of America with his raid on Columbus, New Mexico, a town three miles from the border, on March 9, 1916). The first half of "Villa Rides" is a decent Western, but the action-packed second half starts to go off the rails, as far as sustaining the viewer's interest. The filmmakers obviously needed to take more time to work the kinks out and draw forth the film's potential.

The movie runs 122 minutes and was shot in Guadalajara, Castilla-La Mancha & Madrid, Spain and Mexico (Chihuahua, Sonora & Guanajuato City).

GRADE: Borderline C+/B-

"Villa Rides" says in the opening credits that it is a tribute to Pancho Villa. And, as presented, the film is indeed a tribute in which it paints the former Mexican bandit in pretty colors. We should remember that the Mexican revolutionary had attacked an American town, Columbus, New Mexico. So, the U.S. government sent our own Gen. John J. Pershing into Mexico to hunt down and capture or kill Francisco "Pancho" Villa. His pursuit lasted from March 1916 to February 1917. Pershing was recalled when WW I broke out. Of course, none of this is mentioned in this film.

So, remembering that Hollywood often glosses over history – even rewrites it at times, viewers should always take films like this with a grain of salt – as to their accuracy and truth. Of course, their enjoyment as entertainment is aside from that. Now, to counter that aspect, we should also remember that Villa was a real folk hero among the people. He was a Mexican "Robin Hood," who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. He wasn't out for power himself, but was a genuine revolutionary for the freedom of the people.

We should also remember that it was after 1917 that the dictatorships in Mexico began to oppress the church and religion. Recent Mexican President Vicente Fox acknowledged and lamented the previous tyrannical governments. After 1917, Mexico outlawed religion, killed priests, confiscated and closed churches, and desecrated altars. Not until 1992 did this situation begin to change. Can it be any wonder why so many Mexicans would flee their country and want to live in the U.S. in the 20th century? Besides the economic hardships, the people were terribly persecuted and denied their basic rights.

Now for this film. It has a nice plot with some good action. The cast, for the most part, are quite good. Yul Bryner is very good as Pancho, although I suspect he is quite sanitized. Charles Bronson is very good as Fierro. Some other main characters are all quite good – Fernando Rey as Fuentes, Alexander Knox as Madero, and Herbert Lom as General Huerta. You'll notice I've saved Robert Mitchum until last. His role just doesn't fit as he portrays it. We need the character for the plot, but Mitchum just does not seem to play him right. He seems way too nonchalant. The script, or directing, or acting, or all three needed a major rework there to make his character much more believable. It put a sort of pale of humor over the story, and I don't think it really should be humorous. Not when we see families distraught over the hanging of many of their fathers, husbands and sons by the government army. And, I've never thought it funny when women are raped.

So, I'll give this 7 stars for the action, the story and the roles of Bryner, Bronson and some others. Back to that opening credit on the film – I'm sure that Paramount didn't mean to imply that Hollywood welcomes foreign governments to attack towns in the U.S. Or that it will honor them for doing so. But, wait a minute. I could be wrong about Hollywood.

Mexican bandit and revolutionary Pancho Villa has been portrayed in films before, most notably by Wallace Beery in 1934's "Viva Villa!". Beery bore an uncanny resemblance to the real Pancho Villa, and by all accounts his portrayal is historically quite accurate, although the movie itself isn't. While overall this film is better than Beery's, the miscasting of Yul Brynner as Villa is difficult to overcome, and Robert Mitchum's sleepwalking through his role as an American soldier of fortune caught up in the Mexican revolution doesn't help, either. The two best performances in the film are Charles Bronson as Villa's right-hand man and chief executioner Rodolfo Fierro (Bronson accurately plays him as a man who can murder dozens of people with almost no thought about it; the real Fierro was even more of a butcher than he's shown to be here, and is known to have personally murdered hundreds of people) and Herbert Lom as the murderous Gen. Victoriano Huerta, and although Lom plays him as a sophisticated James Bond-ish Eurotrash villain than the semi-literate Indian and psychopathic killer that Huerta really was, it's still an effective job. The action set pieces are extremely well done and exciting, especially a rebel charge through a marsh against a heavily fortified federale position and, as has been previously mentioned, the film's soundtrack is truly outstanding. So even though Brynner may not be anyone's idea of Pancho Villa, the movie overall is worth a watch.