This is another movie that falls into the "Overlooked
Because I Never Heard of It" category. Not only that, but the historical
background for the story it tells was unknown to me, too, which is sort of
annoying for a history buff like me. So I learned something from it, as well as
being entertained by a good, old-fashioned historical epic.
FOR GREATER GLORY is set in the late 1920s, when the Mexican
government, acting on the Bolshevik leanings of its president, set out to
eradicate the presence of the Catholic Church in Mexico. Bishops were deported,
church services were prohibited, and the priests who weren't executed were
turned into fugitives and outlaws. Not surprisingly, this led to a resistance
movement and finally an outright rebellion by the Mexican people who wanted
freedom to worship. That's the set-up, which as far as I can tell from doing a
little research after we watched the movie, is pretty accurate historically.
For the most part, though, and despite its setting in the
Twentieth Century, FOR GREATER GLORY plays like a Western, and a good one, at
that, with plenty of gunfights, ambushes, cavalry battles, and train robberies.
In one especially good scene, a vaquero named Victoriano who's a member of the
resistance battles an entire army patrol by himself and manages to kill all
fourteen of the soldiers, leading to him being known as El Catorce (The
Fourteen). An actor named Oscar Isaac plays Victoriano and does a great job.
Andy Garcia is probably the biggest name in the cast and
plays a retired general who winds up commanding the rebel army. He's excellent,
as always. The acting is good all around, including an ancient Peter O'Toole as
a priest, although the great Bruce McGill, my favorite contemporary character
actor, is miscast as President Calvin Coolidge.
Mostly, though, we get lots of action, spectacular scenery,
and stirring music. I couldn't help but think about what Sergio Leone would
have done with this story, but Leone's gone so this version is what we have.
It's a very good movie that doesn't quite achieve greatness because it seems to
drag a little in places, but it's certainly well worth watching.
3 comments:
I never heard about this either but it makes sense given that Trotsky fled to Mexico when he lost power in Russia. Sounds interesting.
And, James...while the Mexican Revolution was rather excessively nasty to the RC Church, you have to remember that the church hierarchy, as in Spain and Italy in later decades, was 115% behind the oppressive government the revolutionaries overthrew. Mussolini and Franco got no more enthusiastic support than the corrupt but RCC-friendly regime deposed...only to install the quickly corrupt and at least ham-handed Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) government that would remain in place till the corrupt and hamhanded rightwing National Action Party (PAN, which of couse also means "bread"...lotsa bread, if you get the drift) managed to come in and trade off with PRI for the last decade or so, while the left broke off with PRI to form the Party of the Democratic Revolution, PRD, which is about as successful as leftists are here up north. But we persevere.
I saw a poster for this at the theater and wanted to see it but didn't get the chance. Looks like they've turned the good-guy/bad guy dichotomy around 180 degrees from the typical Hollywood treatment.
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