CHE! (1969)

Nearly forty years before Stephen Soderbergh released his four-hour two-part Che Guevara biopic to respectfully mixed reviews, Twentieth Century-Fox released Richard Fleischer's much-reviled version of the Guevara story, which gets the job done in just over 90 minutes. Ever since, it's been condemned for its outlandish casting of Jack Palance as Fidel Castro, with many seeing Omar Sharif as equally wrong for the title role. I've just watched the film for the first time on the Fox Movie Channel this morning (hence no screencaps), and as I haven't seen Soderbergh's version yet I feel I can judge Fleischer's effort on its own merits, such as they are.

We find Fleischer still in the modestly experimental mode that distinguished his work on The Boston Strangler, since the film opens with Che dead on a Bolivian slab. The only split-screens we get, however, are over the opening credits, as close-ups of the corpse are juxtaposed with newsreel footage of youth protests around the world. The film itself plays out like a simplified version of Citizen Kane. We get multiple points of view on Che from various narrators, some pro and some contra, but the story plays out in linear order from his landing with Castro in Cuba to start the revolution to his death by Bolivian firing squad. The multiple narrators indicate the movie's plan to tell both or all sides of the story, but they also keep us at a distance from the main narrative since no one raconteur interacts extensively with Che. Since there is no interviewer character to hold these narratives together or even explain them, we end up with shots of characters addressing the camera for no good reason. It ends up looking like a shortcut, since these narrators tell what the film should show.

Che Guevara emerges from the multiple accounts as a once mild-mannered but radical medic who is ordered to stay behind the lines during guerrilla engagements but takes the initiative in a pinch and proves himself more revolutionary than the head revolutionary himself. Palance gives an oddly fussy performance as Castro, but the script conceives him as a character who talks the talk more than he walks the walk, more a pretentious blowhard than anything else. He ends up taking military advice from Che, then taking credit for it, while Che seems more enthusiastic about executing people than Castro was. This would have made Che the villain for some viewers, but the tone shifts once we get to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Again, we should be appalled at Che's willingness to risk nuclear war, but the script seems to take his side against Castro and the Soviets at least as far as it seems to condemn the political leaders for preferring to hold on to what they have over extending the revolution. In Che's view that makes the Soviets no more than imperialists themselves, and once Castro proves himself more interested in stabilizing Cuba than spreading revolution abroad, Che quits Cuba and lights out for the territory.

The tone shifts yet again when we reach Bolivia. There's actually a payoff to the corpse scenes as the helicopter bearing the body arrives in the background as a Bolivian general takes up the narration. We also get narration from Sid Haig as a Bolivian revolutionary and Woody Strode as a Cuban veteran who joins Guevara's expedition. They relate a mounting disillusionment with Che as he expresses mounting frustration with Bolivians' reluctance to take up arms with him. Haig does quite well in a big scene in which he denounces Che for becoming no better than a bandit by oppressing the people. What went wrong? We're not given cause to doubt that Bolivia was any less oppressive than Cuba under Battista, but the peasantry shows less political consciousness than the Cubans. Their rejection of Che culminates in a prison scene in which an old peasant blames the captured and wounded rebel leader for his goats not giving milk. The old man wants to be left alone by revolutionaries and armies alike. Having heard this, Che gets up and limps into the execution yard, either realizing the error of his ways or simply demoralized beyond hope.

If the film has a moral, it has nothing to do with Communism as either an economic or political system, and everything to do with the great obstacle self-interest presents to romantic revolutionaries like Che and wannabes like his global admirers. Whether it's the realpolitik of leaders like Castro or the simple desire of simple people to be left alone, too many people have a stake in keeping things as they are for revolutionaries to have an easy time. The Bolivia episode forces the question of how far revolutionaries should go. Che makes believable claims of selflessness, but just as he puts little value on his own life he arguably puts less on anyone else's. If people don't want revolution, even if you've determined that they need it, do you force it upon them at gunpoint. Lenin and all his heirs said yes, and look what it got them. On the other hand, does individual complacency overrule the common good. Should no necessary thing be done because it would mean coercing some people? Your answers to these questions will determine your response to any Che biopic.

This particular biopic was probably doomed from conception. It's from the period when Hollywood was willing to try anything to reach the youth market, and from the same studio that hired Russ Meyer to make two pictures. But Che! labors to make concessions to everyone but the presumed target audience of young people for whom Guevara was an unambiguous hero. Since the movie bursts the Guevara bubble, it was bound to be a turnoff for young moviegoers who might already have been turned off by his life being handled by establishment hands. Likewise, the critics of the day probably wanted something that looked more like The Battle of Algiers, preferably with unknown actors; anything different would have been an insult to Che.

But if something can be salvaged from this mess it's Omar Sharif's performance, which I found one of his best. Once the hair grows long and the beard fills out he really does vanish into the role and his intensity carries you through the fragmented narrative. His casting probably annoyed people who wanted a more authentic actor, but Sharif was Hollywood's all purpose ethnic, having played Mongols, Russians, Germans and Jewish-Americans beside his own ethnicity up to this point in his career. He could act, too, and he's worth seeing here in a movie that, in a way, lets him play a kind of Lawrence of Arabia, a foreigner (Argentine, after all) who teaches scruffy natives how to wage war with deeply ambiguous results. Blacklisted Lawrence of Arabia co-writer Michael Wilson also co-wrote Che! so both he and Sharif may have been conscious of the role reversal involved. The two films, one an undisputed classic and the other allegedly one of the 50 worst movies ever made, would make an interesting double-feature.

MALUALA (1979)

Let's imagine that Estus Pirkle's nightmarish prophecy came true and Communists conquered America in the name of Fidel Castro in the 1970s. A natural question that occurs is: how would this influence what we see in movie theaters? Pirkle himself no doubt imagined that the Reds would fill theaters with propaganda films teaching love for the Leader and hatred of God. I'm sure that there probably were hard-core propaganda films made in Cuba, but so far, on the evidence of First Run Features' Cuban Masterworks Collection, it looks like the island could produce a decent range of entertainment. Sergio Giral's film, however, does have a somewhat subtle propaganda message, and I'm sure it would've ticked off the people of Ron Ormond's Nashville if an occupying power opened it at the local movie house.

That's because Maluala is all about powerful and often shirtless black men leading a slave uprising against white rulers in 19th century Cuba. A quick check of history tells me that the main characters are real people who were active around 1819. At that time, when the island was still ruled by Spain, fugitive slaves took refuge in palenques, nearly unreachable mountain camps, each with its chieftain. Maluala is one of these palenques, but the main character of the film is actually the chief of Bumba, a neighboring camp. He is Ventura Sanchez, also known as Coba. He and his ally Gallo, the chief of Maluala, are among the most dogged holdouts against the Spaniards, who are reluctant, despite some military hotheads, to try frontal assaults on the palenques. Instead, the local governor opts for divide-and-conquer tactics.

Using Catholic priests as intermediaries, the government makes an offer to the palenque chieftains: come to terms with the government and you, the chiefs, will be legally freed. Your people? -- yeah, they'll gradually work off their obligations, and in the meantime you chiefs have to help us track down the remaining holdouts. And did you say you want land? That's asking too much, but you ought to respect His Majesty's generosity and clemency anyway.

Coba and Gallo don't take this bait, but some lesser chiefs who resent these two acting as first among equals take the offer. It soon develops that Coba isn't quite as adamant as Gallo is. This isn't because of any greed or selfishness on Coba's part. He's genuinely worried about the future of his people. In an effective scene, Giral shows him watching the everyday activities of his village, but plays a soundtrack of gunfire, explosions and screaming. Above all, Coba wants to avoid the destruction of his people. Reaching terms with Spain may be the only way, but Coba wants spiritual guidance. Not necessarily persuaded by priests, he consults a fortune teller (who tells him the gods want him to use his own head) and undergoes rituals in hope of securing his people's well being.

The destruction of the camp of a female chieftain decides him on accepting the government's offer, but a little scouting reveals to him that his people's plight would pretty much be a return to slavery, so he he sends everyone back into the mountains -- too late.

The Spaniards chase Coba down and slaughter his people, but they overreach when they try to go after Gallo in Maluala. That's probably why the film is titled as it is. But why isn't Gallo the main character rather than Coba? Because Coba has an internal conflict, a "character arc" if you will, while Gallo remains consistent in his refusal to compromise and trust in the security of his position. Coba is the main character in a cautionary tale that was probably considered not without relevance for the Cuban audience of 1979.

The clear message of Giral's Maluala is: don't compromise with the enemy, even if you think that's the only way out. The enemy is uncompromising, and any hope of saving yourself or your loved ones by appeasing him (to borrow neocon terminology) will only lead to your ruin. The only way to deal with the enemy is Gallo's way: intransigent resistance and determined defense. The message, one supposes, should have been clear to Cubans who might have been wondering whether it was possible to make some kind of concessions, compromise the Revolution in some way to improve relations with the Yanqui imperialists to the north. Give the Americans an inch, Maluala argues by implicit analogy, and they'll take at least a mile.

But you don't have to read a political message into Maluala to appreciate it as a film, and you might appreciate it more if you don't. In many ways, it's probably as close as Cuba came to a blaxploitation film. Coba and Gallo are mighty macho heroes, and Samuel Claxton as Coba especially wouldn't look out of place in the mean streets of American exploitation. You also get voodoo-esque rituals, topless women, and plenty of action in the second half of the story. There's a decent score by Sergio Vitier, suggesting again that the Cubans could hold their own with the Italians as far as film music went. The film may actually remind you of those spaghetti westerns set in revolutionary Mexico, though there's a closer resemblance to Gillo Pontecorvo's Burn!, except that blacks rather than whites are the main characters.

You're probably most likely to find Maluala in a public library if it has a decent foreign film collection like the Albany Public Library has. It's a pretty obscure item compared even to The Adventures of Juan Quin Quin, the last Cuban film I reviewed. There are no reviews up for the title at IMDB, and no clips to be found on YouTube. So you'll have to take my word for it that this is a pretty good first film for folks who want to see what Cuban cinema is capable of.

THE ADVENTURES OF JUAN QUIN QUIN (1967)

A spectre haunts the neophyte contemplating the cinema of Communist countries: the spectre of socialist realism. Ever since Stalin cracked down on the Soviet avant-garde, we've come to expect a certain dogmatic artlessness from lands where Leninism rules: storytelling simple enough for peasants to understand along with mandatory optimism and adulation about leaders. I expected as much from the early years of Castro's Cuba, but should have known better. Totalitarianism is rarely as total as some folks fear. Even the Nazis cranked out the occasional cool film like Munchhausen, so the Cubans were owed a chance to prove themselves. Also, my first sample of Cuban cinema was billed as a comedy, so how totalitarian could it be?

Julio Garcia Espinosa's mock-epic opens with Western style shots of revolutionaries on horseback over a soundtrack by Leo Brouwer that can hold its own with the most energetic pop-cinema scores of the 60s. This leads into the pursuit of the rebel leader Juan Quin Quin on a sugar cane plantation. The landlord orders the cane fields burnt to kill or flush the man out, but Juan survives by digging in. We abruptly cut to what proves to be an earlier episode in Juan's career. He seems to be an altar boy to an obnoxious priest. He goes to the cockfights, where his pal has a rooster entered, hoping to raise money for a sick kid with the proceeds. Juan is asked to intervene when his pal accuses his opponent of using poison to win the fight. He expresses his judgment by slapping the offender in the face with the dead rooster, sparking a brawl in the crowd, through which Juan escapes.

We next see a buxom black woman bound onto a beach, joined shortly by an equally buxom blonde companion. They are circus folk, and Juan and his pal Jachero have a scheme to make money staging bullfights. This leads to them acquiring the circus's lion and hauling its cage up a steep hill. At the top, Jachero leans on the cage to rest, sending it speeding down into an easily panicked town -- good publicity for "the first corrida ever in Cuba." Having acquired a bull, Juan sets about fighting it. The bull wins and escapes through the stands into the village, but Juan isn't really worse for wear until the authorities show up to collect a fine for an illegally staged event. It may be the law, but Juan objects that "Laws are meant to protect poor people." Speaking of the poor, once they get their bull back the next stop is a village so poor that no one can afford admission and the bull is slaughtered and picked clean while Juan isn't looking.

Now back to the revolution. Things are looking bad for the bearded Juan as the army surrounds his plucky band. He needs Jachero to get through the last pocket to alert an ally before the noose is closed. Jachero is obliged to ride the side of a cow through enemy lines, then make a mad dash across a railway bridge to catch a train. Finding suspicious characters on board, he dashes off the other way at heightened speed. The army is on the lookout. A soldier prods a wagonload of hay, hoping that Jachero is inside. His commander uses a machine gun. It turns out that Jachero was inside, but he was only shot in the leg. He accomplishes his mission, then resolves to make his rendezvous with Juan under his own lame power.

Here's where the film becomes eccentric. As Jachero limps through the landscape, he thinks "What a beautiful countryside...from a distance." How do I know what he was thinking? Because a cartoon thought balloon appears to tell me, that's how. He has further recourse to this mode of communication when a friendly farm woman aids him and feeds him some sardine pie. Despite her efforts, Jachero is captured in the morning and about to be hanged when the revolutionaries ride to the rescue. At this point a title card appears: "ENOUGH OF THIS TOMFOOLERY! At this point some scenes of Latin American family life could be inserted." They could, but aren't, and we're back to the battle. Juan rescues Jachero in the nick of time, and the next card comments, "It would also be possible to put this or that pointless UN meeting here." Yes, but no.

Instead, Juan's reunion with the woman Teresa leads us to an official flashback to Juan's days as a circus Jesus, uttering the last sacred words before reminding the audience to come back tomorrow for another show. "Jesus" signs a photo for a young fan, then tips his crown of thorns in respect when Teresa's father chides him for flirting with her. He has other roles in the circus, which is the same one with the two ladies we met earlier in the picture. Most dramatically, he is "the Man of a Thousand Lives." A Cuban David Blaine, he is buried alive and must remain underground for half an hour while the ladies dance and Jachero appears as "the Cuban Fakir" who dares audience members to jump on his chest while he lays, with visible discomfort, on a bed of broken glass. One man loses his nerve, but when a big Army guy wants to try, Jachero loses his nerve and runs away as Teresa storms the ring to dig Juan out of his tomb.

Here's an extended clip of the circus scene and its aftermath. The synchronization and aspect ratio are better on the DVD, but you can see the whole movie in ten installments on You Tube.

We next see Juan and Jachero as aspiring sharecroppers. They agree to clear some land for an eccentric landowner to start a coffee plantation. The landowner is a serene type; dressed in a kimono, he meditates daily by contemplating the fish in his aquarium. He also rips off our heroes after they labor at great speed to clear the land. This seems to be when our heroes are radicalized once and for all. They study the art of guerrilla warfare, as a narrator elaborates the essentials of infiltration and surprise, with Jachero often illustrating by negative examples. There's a long, almost inexplicably funny sequence, in which he annoys an officer who's fond of singing while he's drunk, that serves as prelude to the climactic attack, rendered in large part as slapstick comedy. There are bits of cartoonish action. Half a dozen army guys dogpile on top of Juan. He crawls out from under them with their weapons, which he hands to Teresa. He then crawls back into the dogpile, in order to get more weapons. It's hardly a spoiler for a comedy to tell you that victory is assured....

From this source I learn that Julio Garcia Espinosa espoused something that he called "imperfect cinema." Basically it's the Brechtian thing: a rejection of the seamless storytelling and easy audience identification with characters allegedly typical of Hollywood in the hope that, rather than wallow in an illusory realism, audiences will see that they're supposed to learn something. What the Cuban audience is meant to learn, however, is unclear. The academic critics see Juan Quin Quin as a send-up of Hollywood genres, but acknowledge that Espinosa doesn't really transcend the generic conventions he was supposedly satirizing. He seems to be having too much fun. The film itself is simply too irreverent in every aspect to have any didactic effect. It trounced my expectation of a Cuban cinema trapped in dogmatic isolation from the rest of the world. Itself part of a Hispanic picaresque tradition that goes back to Don Quixote if not earlier, Juan Quin Quin seems fully engaged with global pop culture, from spaghetti westerns to the silents-influenced slapstick of AIP comedies. Leo Brouwer's score adds to that impression. On this small evidence, he may have been in the same league as Les Baxter, John Barry and all their Italian peers. There's also some 60s-style stunt casting, with Enrique Santiesteban playing all the villainous roles in the story, though with less diversity of visage than Peter Sellers might offer. As our heroes, Julio Martinez and Erdwin Fernandez are consistently entertaining; they would've made a good team on a more regular basis. But as it happens, Fernandez only made one more film (according to IMDB) while Martinez ended up as a stuntman and worked in that capacity on James Cameron's Titanic.

I shouldn't jump to conclusions before watching more Cuban films (and this is one in a five-film Cuban Masterworks set available at the Albany Public Library), but I want to say that it's doubly to Cuba's credit that Juan Quin Quin was reportedly the country's most popular film of the 1960s. It's first to the credit of Cubans for patronizing the film, and it's also to the credit of the Cuban government for giving them the chance. Revolutionaries with thinner skins might not have seen all the humor on hand here, but the Castro brothers seem like good sports on this occasion for indulging a film that makes revolution itself, along with much else, look a little silly. I recommend it as an almost lost puzzle piece that makes our picture of global pop cinema of the 1960s more complete.