HBO’s impact on television as trendsetter, tastemaker, and gamechanger is obvious. If evidence is needed, look no further than the fact that I’m largely indifferent to television and averse to streaming subscriptions, yet have somehow absorbed in my lifetime one season apiece of Girls, Rome, Boardwalk Empire, Carnivale, The Newsroom, Eastbound and Down, and The Leftovers, two seasons apiece of The Wire, Extras, and True Blood, three seasons of Deadwood, four of Silicon Valley, eight of Game of Thrones, The Young and New Pope, the pilot of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, Eddie Murphy's Delirious, Angels in America, and a smattering of episodes of Tracey Takes On, Sex and the City, Da Ali G Show, and Bored to Death. I don’t list the above to boast—truth be told, I’d be fine without the lot of them, bar Delirious, Angels, and Anthony Minghella’s lovely Detective Agency pilot—though I’ll concede listing one’s viewing is a very Harry Knowles thing to do. Rather, I list to illustrate that even someone as HBO- and television-agnostic as myself has averaged a few hours of HBO programming a year across 41 years on Earth.
From HBO Films—the feature and premium miniseries wing of the company, with a special hustle on prestige TV biopics (routinely starring Al Pacino) and ripped-from-headlines dramas—I’ve also chalked up a few titles, some of which I did not know were HBO-affiliated: A Passage to India (the biggest surprise), The Hitcher, Three Amigos, Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead, Amistad, Live from Baghdad, American Splendor, Elephant, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, Red Dust, The Notorious Bettie Paige, The Special Relationship, Behind the Candelabra, and Russell Mulcahy’s unforgettable Ricochet and completely forgettable Blue Ice. That lineup—well-intentioned overall, mostly released theatrically, with some near-but-not-quite classics, some non-starters, and a lot of middle ground—isn’t really the most characteristic of the brand, and certainly doesn’t evoke the cultural clout of television programming like The Sopranos or Six Feet Under (neither of which I’ve seen). But as someone whose loyalties lie with film, it’s more to my speed, and I’d gladly revisit, say, Don’t Tell Mom over The Newsroom and, hands down, Three Amigos over Carnivale.
All this preamble circuitously brings us to And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself (2003), directed by Bruce Beresford. It's a HBO Films co-production, and precisely the sort of idiosyncratic, niche subject, tonally specific, true-ish story, generously-budgeted-for-television, marquee-ish star and director-driven oddity that would not exist outside of HBO, so for that I am grateful. Having said that, its status as a telemovie is also what kept me from watching it until now, despite being directed by Beresford—a filmmakers whose praises I’ve repeatedly sung on this site and recently sang on Senses of Cinema—and despite me knowing it from Beresford’s excellent published diaries, Josh Hartnett definitely wants to do this.
Based on true events, the telemovie features Antonio Banderas in the title role of Pancho Villa, a general in the Mexican Revolution. The film dramatizes Villa’s entreaty to Hollywood to chronicle his freedom fighting exploits, which culminated in a 1914 film, now lost, titled The Life of General Villa, produced by D.W. Griffith (the year before The Birth of a Nation) and starring Villa as himself and Raoul Walsh (played here by Kyle Chandler) as the younger Villa. Much of Beresford's film unfolds through the eyes of budding producer/nepo-baby Frank N .Thayer (Eion Bailey), who chronicle's Villa's exploits and whom Villa takes a liking to.
The subject matter of the film, and its recreation of both filmmaking of yore and lost film footage, is catnip for hopeless cinephiles like myself but not exactly an easy sell, hence my gratitude to HBO for shepherding this type of made-for-nobody-but-surely-for-somebody material to the screen. HBO’s earlier cult success with Three Amigos, likewise about the unlikely collision of Hollywood and Mexican liberators in the 1910s, might have greased the wheels, though it probably didn't, given that film’s selling point was its comedic stars and not its high concept. More realistically, the casting of Banderas would have sweetened the pot, especially since he’d already portrayed several folk hero/freedom fighter-type characters in the late 1990s: the Mariachi in Desperado, Zorro in The Mask of Zorro, and Evita’s Che Guevara. He’s given more notes to play here (albeit not composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber) as the heroic but ambivalent Villa. Like T.E. Lawrence, immortalized in Lawrence of Arabia, Villa is a canny self-fashioner conscious of the persuasive power of media (John Reed, immortalized in Reds, was among his media circle), and like Lawrence in Lean’s film, his romantic public veneer is peeled away in Beresford's film to reveal darker hues. Unfortunately, Bailey's performance as Thayer is a blander shade of meat, with the actor and character never rising above a boring audience surrogate (see also Gregory Harrison in Razorback).
Beresford has directed on both epic (Black Robe) and intimate (Breaker Morant) canvasses. Pancho Villa utilizes both skill sets, and Beresford executes the literate, witty screenplay by Larry Gelbart—a veteran comedy writer whose work includes the script for Tootsie and the book for Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum—with his trademark clarity. Having said that, there is a tangible difference between film and television, and for all its care Pancho Villa looks, feels, moves, and is lit, paced, and emphatically scored like a telemovie, a symptom of the tech used, production constraints, and baked-in conventions of the medium. For most viewers, especially in this era where streaming ‘content’ has largely eradicated distinctions between mediums, that’s no big deal. Personally, and again at risk of being Harry Knowles, I think Pancho Villa would have been better served by the medium at the centre of its screen story and with the texture and luxuries that medium affords. I don’t overly care for The Artist, which similarly plays in the pool of silent Hollywood, nor Argo, which similarly depicts a novel intersection of Hollywood and global politics (and also stars the late Alan Arkin, Australia’s very own Captain Invincible), but those offer case studies of Pancho Villa with a little more room to breathe and play. Again, no disrespect to HBO as patron saint of made-for-nobody-but-surely-for-somebody.
While
they’re quite disparate works, there are some noteworthy parallels and contrasts between
Pancho Villa and the previous entry on DUF, The Rats of Tobruk. Both are set
against backdrops of conflict: one global, the other domestic. Tobruk is the
work of a filmmaker dramatizing recent history, while Pancho Villa dramatizes other filmmakers’ attempts to chronicle history as it unfolds and, failing that,
re-enact it. Chauvel would visit Hollywood in the early 1920s, thus dwelling in
the very industry milieu which Pancho Villa presents, and the makers of The
Life of General Villa foreshadow Chauvel’s efforts with Bounty, and to a lesser
degree Tobruk, to combine dramatization with documentary evidence. Chauvel, in
turn, foreshadows The Life of General Villa star and future director Raoul Walsh by casting Errol
Flynn in Bounty: Walsh would direct Flynn in an impressive nine films, including They Died
With Their Boots On.