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Samuel Fuller in Arizona like O. Henry in Texas, "beautiful and simple as all truly great swindles are." The desert drenched in rain introduces just the right whiff of tall tale, Vladimir Sokoloff answering the door as "Pepito" cements the lovely absurdity. America in her 19th-century infancy is still a set of floating pieces, the former clerk (Vincent Price) makes a grab for one of them with a monumental forgery scheme, laying claim to a whole territory and making ranchers buy back their own land. The path of the "man who changed geography" is a painstaking one, it involves literally erasing and rewriting the past—years at a Spanish monastery (a maze of doors leads to manuscripts chained to shelves), crashing a royal soiree with a gypsy troupe, and, above all, molding the barefoot orphan into the Baroness (Ellen Drew). Lordly in his office before a vast map, he still has to face the wrath of settlers ("In God we trusted, in Arizona we busted," reads a banner) and the suspicion of the government agent (Reed Hadley) who smells "a bad cigar in a rich Spanish leaf." History on the move, media at the ready: "Gentlemen, let's not have any violence. At least until I have my story." A strange, obsessive Western that namedrops Aristotle and Columbus, an American fable of impostors and miracles (the counterfeit man turns real at the end of a rope in the gaze of a woman), a Balzacian comedy recalled by a man who, like Fuller, can't help admiring a rogue who wields ingenuity in a wolfish world. Welles balloons the theme in F for Fake, Herzog's Cobra Verde gives the antithesis. With Beulah Bondi, Robert Barrat, and Tina Pine. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |