Oakland Tribune
By Robert Taylor
6/22/1968
About the only
reason for staying through “Villa Rides” is to see whether you are bored to
death before all the characters are killed off.
The Paramount
release now at six Eastbay theaters has Yul Brynner as a sullen Pancho Villa,
Robert Mitchum as a pilot who’s working with him, and features the bloody
bodies of hundreds of Spaniards (the picture, set in Mexico, was filmed in
Spain).
It claims to
be a cheaper in Mexican history when Villa came out of retirement to help get
rid of the “Colorados,” counter-revolutionaries who threatened President
Madero.
The movie’s
senseless and for no serious purpose (depicting the path of revolutions, for
instance). It is all much more difficult to sit through than it might have been
a few weeks ago.
There are rapes and plunders, hanging, bodies
swinging from ropes in the background, the shooting of prisoners one by one,
the bombing of a troop train. In one scene, Brynner casually drops a bomb down
a well where a fleeing army officer is hiding.
Brynner’s
Villa is al brutality, with little hint of the revolutionary, patriot or
popular hero. “Pancho Villa is a bandit, a bigamist and a barbarian,” Mitchum
says, as if writing the movie ads.
In one
confrontation, Mitchum describes himself as “just like you – first a bandit,
then when I get big enough they’ll call me a hero.”
Don’t be
surprised if Mexico retaliates by taking back California, or at least
confiscating the Pasramount studios. No wonder they made the picture in Spain.
Mitchum walks
sleepy-eyed though his part as a mercenary, wearing a clean white shirt
throughout, shaking his head a couple of times at the savage “Mexican.”
One
interesting bit of casting is Alexander Knox as the troubled Madero. Knox
played the equally troubled President Woodrow Wilson in a 1944 film which was a
box-office failure when action packed war movies were pulling in crowds.
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