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A film of murals, as Blood and Sand is a film of paintings, inspired right down to Mischa Auer's evocation of Buster Keaton by way of Orozco. Rouben Mamoulian opens with a gangland rubout à la Scarface then pulls back to form a screen within a screen, a matinee for a rapt audience at the Gran Cine Eden in Mexico. Grinning in the front row is "the worst bad man in this whole country" (Leo Carrillo), who believes his henchmen could stand to learn from these Hollywood racketeers. A melee erupts and the projectionist switches to a travelogue, the tenor (Nino Martini) plays benshi and pacifies the crowd with a song, the jefe has a new addition to his gang. Floppy sombreros and pistols and mammoth cacti set the stage for the reluctant bandito, the eloping American (Ida Lupino) sees right through it: "Well, the villain always does that, doesn't he? I'm afraid it's still amateur night." The vast skies are soon seized by Fernández, here they loom over a blatantly artificial hacienda that's key to Mamoulian's playful sense of rehearsal and performance. A Spanglish version of "Lookie Lookie Lookie, Here Comes Cookie" is curtailed at the radio station for an aria at gunpoint, Chevalier's Apache shadow (Love Me Tonight) reappears by a campfire fusillade. "You got the worst manners of any hombre I ever killed!" When Chicago thugs (led by Stanley Fields' Public Enemy Number One, who keeps a portrait of Lincoln on his desk) are invited to the hideout, the lesson in outlawry becomes a business takeover. (The joke is carried over from Mena's The Education of Popo, surely.) The "soul of an artist" triumphs in the end, "only in the movies." With Harold Huber, James Blakeley, Frank Puglia, Al Ernest Garcia, Adrian Rosley, and Paul Hurst. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |