This movie is an unusual biopic. It is supposed to be about the great Mexican president Benito Juárez, but it ends up focusing more on the story of Emperor Maximilien.
The story: In the 1860's, the French Emperor Napoleon III (Claude Rains) sends French forces to occupy Mexico, on the pretext of establishing a North American regime of the French empire. Napoleon sends the Austrian Maximilian of Hapsburg (Brian Aherne) and his wife, Charlotte of Belgium (Bette Davis), to be his puppet Emperor and Empress of Mexico. But Benito Juárez (Paul Muni) organizes the Mexican peasantry to fight back against the French.
As usual with biopics, this is the American Hollywood version of Mexican history. As the ill-fated Maximilian, Brian Aherne actually has more screen time than the title character. He gives a good performance of a well-meaning but naive emperor who wants to rule the Mexican people justly, but can't understand the concepts of democracy. The American filmmakers obviously decided that it was better to focus on the romantic European characters than on the Mexicans.
Paul Muni, meanwhile, has little to do in his role as Juárez. Oh sure, he occasionally makes grim-faced, wise-and-meaningful speeches about democracy (with a portrait of Abraham Lincoln strategically placed on the wall behind Muni, just to make sure we get the point.) But most of the time, he just stands around dressed in black, looking stern and Lincoln-like. Muni has one great scene, where he walks fearlessly toward a firing squad of Mexican soldiers who have been ordered to shoot him. John Wayne should have had such a walk!
Bette Davis lends a fairly good (but not great) supporting performance as the troubled Empress Charlotte, who goes mad after Napoleon withdraws from Mexico and abandons her husband to his fate. John Garfield appears as Porfirio Diaz, and Claude Rains and Gale Sondergaard have brief but well-done scenes as Napoleon and his smarmy French Empress. (This was their second film together, after "Anthony Adverse," where they played the villainous couple. They had it down pat by this time.) But the movie really belongs to Aherne, who dominates the screen with his portrait of a "lost emperor"...who is lost in more ways than one.
The story: In the 1860's, the French Emperor Napoleon III (Claude Rains) sends French forces to occupy Mexico, on the pretext of establishing a North American regime of the French empire. Napoleon sends the Austrian Maximilian of Hapsburg (Brian Aherne) and his wife, Charlotte of Belgium (Bette Davis), to be his puppet Emperor and Empress of Mexico. But Benito Juárez (Paul Muni) organizes the Mexican peasantry to fight back against the French.
As usual with biopics, this is the American Hollywood version of Mexican history. As the ill-fated Maximilian, Brian Aherne actually has more screen time than the title character. He gives a good performance of a well-meaning but naive emperor who wants to rule the Mexican people justly, but can't understand the concepts of democracy. The American filmmakers obviously decided that it was better to focus on the romantic European characters than on the Mexicans.
Paul Muni, meanwhile, has little to do in his role as Juárez. Oh sure, he occasionally makes grim-faced, wise-and-meaningful speeches about democracy (with a portrait of Abraham Lincoln strategically placed on the wall behind Muni, just to make sure we get the point.) But most of the time, he just stands around dressed in black, looking stern and Lincoln-like. Muni has one great scene, where he walks fearlessly toward a firing squad of Mexican soldiers who have been ordered to shoot him. John Wayne should have had such a walk!
Bette Davis lends a fairly good (but not great) supporting performance as the troubled Empress Charlotte, who goes mad after Napoleon withdraws from Mexico and abandons her husband to his fate. John Garfield appears as Porfirio Diaz, and Claude Rains and Gale Sondergaard have brief but well-done scenes as Napoleon and his smarmy French Empress. (This was their second film together, after "Anthony Adverse," where they played the villainous couple. They had it down pat by this time.) But the movie really belongs to Aherne, who dominates the screen with his portrait of a "lost emperor"...who is lost in more ways than one.