Viva Zapata!

Emiliano Zapata is part of a delegation that comes to the capital on behalf of peasants whose land has been taken under the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. Diaz notes his name. The road from there to armed struggle, to a won revolution and to Zapata briefly holding power sets up the film's real question: can the man who takes power stay unlike the man he overthrew. The story ends with Zapata's death in 1919. Elia Kazan directed from a screenplay by John Steinbeck. Marlon Brando plays Zapata, Anthony Quinn his brother Eufemio and Jean Peters his wife. Quinn won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. The film was nominated in four other categories: Best Actor, Best Original Screenplay, Best Art Direction and Alex North's score. It was shot not in Mexico but across the American southwest: Durango in Colorado, Roma and San Ygnacio in Texas, and New Mexico. To get the look of the period Kazan worked at length from archive photographs, above all the collection of Agustin Casasola covering 1909 to 1919, and many shots come straight from those images. The box office was modest: 1.9 million dollars in United States rentals against a 1.8 million budget. Bosley Crowther in the New York Times wrote that it throbs with a rare vitality, while Variety found both the direction and the script short of their potential. What loads the film politically is the calendar. It opened in February 1952 and Kazan appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee that April and named names, while the picture was still in cinemas. Kazan had been a member of the American Communist Party between 1934 and 1936. He also spoke plainly about the character of Aguirre, saying he built him out of the ideologically driven and ruthless communists he had known in those circles. That is why the account of Zapata changing once he holds power reads less like a revolutionary story than like a settling of accounts. Who it is for: viewers who like revolutionary stories and early Brando. Who it is not for: anyone wanting Mexican history from its own sources. The film reads Zapata through an American political argument, and that reading is still contested.