L'ultima dei Montezuma

Impressive looking and charismatic historical drama with great sets and costumes and the sex appeal that one would expect from a movie like this.

The plot is on unfortunate combination of very simple and yet still hard follow. It isn't obvious who is whom and their motivations even when the movie wants you to know them.

It drags so much in certain parts without progressing that this is not one I can really recommend.

Despite everything, however, I was still impacting by the impression of a proud nation that has become just another footnote in history and the woman that was never master of her own fate.

It's a vehicle for Geraldine Farrar, the opera star who, for a few years, was Cecil Demille's big movie star. After she had played Carmen and Joan of Arc for him, this was another of the movies he and co-writers William Demille and Jeanie Macpherson designed for her, with massive sets, sumptuous costumes, and melodramatic histrionics to rival anything that could be done on the operatic stage.

Miss Farrar plays a haughty Aztec princess in the time when the Spanish invaded and conquered Mexico. She has advanced ideas. She does not believe in human sacrifice, particularly when her handmaiden, Julia Faye is to have her heart torn out. She opposes it even when it comes to non-Aztec victims. When handsome Wallace Reid is caught and is due to die, she goes to Cortez, in the person of Hobart Bosworth, and offers to let them rescue Reid, if he promises to leave the city he has been besieging immediately afterwards.

That seems unlikely, doesn't it? The real issue, though, is how to have an actress hold the screen without being overwhelmed by the sets and the considerable chops of her co-stars. At a time when Griffith would solve the problem by cuts to close-ups, Demille has confidence that Farrar will dominate the screen by her presence, and she does. Her years of doing the same on the busy stage and her mature voluptuousness is in stark contrast to the norms of the day. She does not have to fight the spectacle, she is the spectacle.

This reconstruction of Aztec history looks more like pageantry than a teleological interpretation of Mayan life. It painted the past to meet the sensibilities of a new generation of middle class audiences, but also worked as historical and cultural rape of another community.