Gillo Pontecorvo's bold follow-up to "The Battle of Algiers" has become something of a cult movie over the years for a variety of reasons, (not least for the involvement of Brando), but it is a film that is little seen and was something of a commercial disaster. Set in the Antilles in the mid nineteenth century and dealing with revolution, the studios must have thought they had an adventure yarn on their hands, a swashbuckler albeit with political overtones. But the film is much closer in tone to "The Battle of Algiers" than it is to "The Crimson Pirate" and like "The Battle of Algiers" is almost a revolutionary textbook.
Brando's presence is almost incongruous since Pontecorvo cast an amateur, Evaristo Marquez, as his adversary and the film is certainly no 'star vehicle' even if Brando's performance is one of his finest and surely one of his most perverse. He plays William Walker, an English agent provocateur, sent to the island of Quiemada to instruct the natives in the art of revolt and overthrow the legitimate government, picking an uneducated, if charismatic, native, (Marquez), as the revolution's leader. But he instills in the man a Marxist sense of revolutionary fervor over and above what he had originally planned and finds himself returning to the island ten years later to help quell the revolution he had instigated.
This is a complex, diffuse film shot, (superbly by Marcello Gatti and Giuseppe Ruzzolini), like a documentary. Despite Brando's presence the studios just didn't know how to market it and it was released in a truncated version, (which is one currently reviewed here). If it isn't the masterpiece "The Battle of Algiers" was or lead us to expect from Pontecorvo, it never deserved its fate. Well worth seeking out.
Brando's presence is almost incongruous since Pontecorvo cast an amateur, Evaristo Marquez, as his adversary and the film is certainly no 'star vehicle' even if Brando's performance is one of his finest and surely one of his most perverse. He plays William Walker, an English agent provocateur, sent to the island of Quiemada to instruct the natives in the art of revolt and overthrow the legitimate government, picking an uneducated, if charismatic, native, (Marquez), as the revolution's leader. But he instills in the man a Marxist sense of revolutionary fervor over and above what he had originally planned and finds himself returning to the island ten years later to help quell the revolution he had instigated.
This is a complex, diffuse film shot, (superbly by Marcello Gatti and Giuseppe Ruzzolini), like a documentary. Despite Brando's presence the studios just didn't know how to market it and it was released in a truncated version, (which is one currently reviewed here). If it isn't the masterpiece "The Battle of Algiers" was or lead us to expect from Pontecorvo, it never deserved its fate. Well worth seeking out.