Kojo

My friends and I were lounging around watching a boring football game when we chanced onto this 1950's spectacular on TCM. We were astounded, stupefied. I'm not normally one of those people who gets off on really bad films--most bad films are just plain bad. But this was so bad, it was surreal--and hilarious. John Wayne, as usual, plays John Wayne, except this time America's iconic cowboy Real Man is in phony Oriental make-up, prancing around in fuzzy pelt vests, spouting lines in Medieval Mongolian Shakespearian barbarian-speak with a Western twang. (Example: "Ya didn't suckle me ta be slain by Tartars, my mo-ther.") With lavish pretensions toward epic grandeur, the sweeping outdoor vistas of the Central Asian steppe looking suspiciously like southern Utah, where the movie was indeed filmed. You think I'm making this up? I beg you, please rent this film! You won't regret it. Unlike most bad films, this film really is so bad that it's good. It's a bona fide disaster!

I hated the freakin' 70's: Grafitti all over the subways (I grew up in then-crime-ridden New York City), Jimmy Carter's "malaise," Son of Sam, Patty Hearst, dumb detective shows on TV, disco, and polyester. So why, then, does this show make me all misty-eyed? I particularly love the drug innuendo. The obvious parallels to "Happy Days" break down there--that and the fact that people nowadays dress the same as the characters, whereas back in the 70's we didn't dress anything like the characters on "Happy Days," but instead we dressed just like the people on "That 70s Show." Does that make sense? Wow, far out. Maybe I should get a tape recorder so I can get all this down.

It's always refreshing and heartening to see an old film that isn't too racist or condescending towards people of color. Juarez concerns itself with one of the more interesting episodes of Mexico's fascinating history: The brief and rather tragic reign of the puppet-emperor Maximilian, a liberal-minded Austrian nobleman who was foisted upon the Mexican people by the machinations of Napoleon III. The movie divides its time between Maximilian and his wife Carlotta (Bette Davis), and their chief antagonist, Benito Juarez, the so-called "Abraham Lincoln of Mexico" (an image that is emphasized rather heavy-handedly). Benito Juarez was a full-blooded Native American, but aside from a stereotypically stoical demeanor ("Indians never cry," someone says, "not even as children"), he is portrayed with immense dignity by Paul Muni as the honest champion of democracy and equality that he is widely held to have been. The movie is a rather straight-forward historical narrative, without much in terms of psychological depth or irony or anything like that, but is interesting for what it says about Mexico in 1867 as well as Hollywood in 1939 (i.e., that there apparently were industry types who saw Mexicans as human beings, even though 5 years down the road Los Angeles would be witness to the anti-Mexican pogrom known as the "Zoot Suit Riots," and Hollywood as a whole wouldn't begin to acknowledge Latino demographics for another 50 years after that). I don't know much about Bette Davis, but it's probably safe to say that this isn't one of her more stellar roles.