Gustavo Dahl was a core person in Cinema Novo movement, having worked in many productions in different roles (quite successful as editor), besides also being an important film critic and director of Brazilian national cinema company Embrafilme. As a director and as a writer, however, Dahl had few feature-length movies, and this was the first of them. "The brave warrior", full of great actors, is well filmed and edited, but seems a little restrained. The greatest merit, perhaps, is the courageous political content of the dialogs, for a movie released during the hard days of military dictatorship. It is deffinitely a Marxist movie. I cannot help but compare it with the tons of crap in Brazilian commercial cinema nowadays portraying politics this way: "all politicians are the same, corrupt, and then we need rich successful businessmen not to steal us and make a good government/management". In "A brave warrior", there are indeed corrupt politicians who do not care about the people, but they are allied of those rich businessmen. They are portrayed in luxury while talking about deprivation and poverty. The left, represented by a "Radical party" (the film did not use real party names), close to trade unions, clearly wanted to show the opposite interests between employees and employers, and did not have many votes because the people were manipulated by hegemonic office-seeking "National party". Upper classes also infiltrate schemers to dampen radical politics inside unions in order to keep everything the same. Then, instead of nowadays depolitization in mainstream cinema in Brazil, Dahl's film is quite didactic on party, parliamentary and union politics, and on class struggle.
