Juarez [DVD] [1939] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

Muni doesn't make much of an impression plodding around impassively as Juarez, and with his stony facial expression the screenwriters and director clearly decided they'd better do **something** to remind the audience he was playing the good guy. So, Muni is always photographed in front of pictures of Abraham Lincoln (to remind viewers he's the republican). Aherne and Davis fare much better as the tragic Hapsburgs, and the film does have one great scene when Davis has to go to France to plead Naopeon and Eugenie for support and goes mad before their very eyes. Though you'd never guess it from the film's general free-and-easy approach to history, this scene actually happened in real life, and the dialogue in the scene pretty much follows the historical record--and there's a great visual touch when Davis, convinced the Bonapartes are trying to poison her, runs out of into the Tuileries gardens as if possessed into the night, her beautiful silver silk traveling dress billowing like a cloud around her as she shrinks into the blackness of the night (and her madness). But this, and the film's lovely use of "La Paloma" as a recurrent musical theme, are hardly enough to sustain you through the longeurs of Muni stalking around like a zombie.

What better story, then, than that of Benito Juárez, the destitute-born president who saved democracy fighting against French foreign rule from autocrat Louis Napoleon III's interventing troops and puppet regime in mid XIX century Mexico. A great politically-correct history lesson, tailor-made for the current menacing times. However, Hollywood had serious second thoughts about this film being made, most of them regarding Juárez himself.

Screenwriter Aeneas Mackenzie thought the movie wouldn't sell because Juárez's indian features resembled "a pithecantropus" while Maximilian and Carlotta were young, white and handsome. American audiences would have difficulty seeing the doomed couple as "bad guys", much less rooting for such an ugly hero. Not only that, Don Benito was rabidly anticlerical, a liberal freemason who took on the pope and nationalized all Church properties; Catholics at the box office wouldn't like that either. Warner Bros then hired a young John Huston to ammend the script: Juárez would carry a portrait of Lincoln at all times to make him more amiable, the Church would be written off, replaced by some imaginary "landowners", and Louis Napoleon's evilness would be emphasized by dark, contrasted, horror-movie-like lighting.

Even so the movie didn't do well, neither in the States nor in Mexico. There it was premiered in a gala screening at the Bellas Artes Palace, a rare honor for any film even today. The sequence where the American ambassador warns Napoleon against defying the Monroe Doctrine was suppressed altogether, and the finale, where Juárez apologizes to Maximilian at his coffin, drew loud protests from the audience. Mexican critics tore the film apart in their reviews, calling it a Hollywood sugarcoated version of Mexican history (it is) and an affront to national pride (it is not). In that sense, the movie's best intentions clearly backfired.

But is the movie that bad? Well, yes and no: it's your average Hollywood period romance. Wonderful sets and costumes but lots of preachy dialogue and not much historical truth. Then again, not many pictures at the time cared about those things. Bette Davis does an interesting Carlotta, Muni is a deadpan bore, and Claude Rains -as usual- steals the show (as Napoleon III). Oddly enough, the film had an influence on another quite different movie. Director Terence Young liked William Dieterle's filmmaking so much, he borrowed for 'Dr. No' the scene where Juárez is shown for the first time: one just sees his back while he speaks, and when someone asks his name, he turns around and says: "Juárez", giving him an air of mystery and awe. Young introduced his movie's main character the same way: you only see his hands playing cards at the casino table, then a gorgeous girl asks his name, the camera goes up and... voila!, a classic is born: "Bond, James Bond". Thank Juárez, Benito Juárez, for that one.

Benito Who?