When you watch an older film like In Old Arizona, which was reportedly the first sound era Western and the first talkie to be filmed primarily in the outdoors, you get to see moments that are clearly not related to the plot and don’t necessarily add anything to our understanding of the characters or their behaviors. Those moments, however, do serve to demonstrate the novelty of that “new” invention for the movies: sound. For example, In Old Arizona features an early sequence where four guys are harmonizing the song “Bicycle Built for Two.” There are no bicycles in the film, and there’s no particular reason for these men to be singing together outdoors, and they don’t seem to show up again in the film, but it’s a way for you to marvel at how advanced the sound quality of the film is.
In Old Arizona features Warner Baxtor as the Cisco Kid, an Oscar-winning role he would play several more times in his career. We first meet the Kid as he robs a stagecoach and takes the Wells Fargo box with all of the money. He’s very apologetic and polite as he’s stealing from the stagecoach, and he doesn’t take anything from the individual passengers that he doesn’t give them something in return. It’s an interesting way to meet a character, and it allows us to see that, despite his penchant for taking stuff that doesn’t belong to him, he’s really a good person. The story upon which the film’s plot was based, apparently, treats the Cisco Kid as more of a villain, but he’s clearly meant to earn out sympathy even from the start of the movie.
Almost no one knows what the Cisco Kid looks like, which is rather tough to believe given how dazzling the costumes are that he wears. There’s a lot of work that’s gone into the stitching and details of the various clothes Baxter gets to don, and no other character in the movie is wearing such elaborate garb. Still, this kind of anonymity allows for some funny moments, such as when he’s at the barber shop and is surrounded by men talking about him and his various crimes and how dangerous he is and how they’re going to capture him. He even meets Sgt. Mickey Dunn (played, rather broadly and somewhat badly, by Edmund Lowe) in person, and they talk about women and haircuts and perfume. They also have an intriguing moment when they pat each other’s guns and talk about how big the “guns” are. The guns, of course, are strapped to belts around their waists, so you know the general area we’re talking about here. It’s very reminiscent of a similar scene in Red River, but it sadly doesn’t last very long.
Once Dunn learns from the blacksmith that he’s been talking to the Cisco Kid, the film shifts to being more about a love triangle. You see, the Kid loves a woman named Tonia Maria. He even sings, briefly, to her, perhaps one of the first instances of a singing cowboy in the movies. However, she’s astonishingly unfaithful to him; in fact, she’s getting rid of one of her lovers just as he rides up to her home. Tonia (played by Dorothy Burgess) falls very quickly into the stereotypical sexualized Latina. After she’s spent time with the Kid, she almost immediately goes to the bar in town and meets Sgt. Dunn. She flirts with him, but he initially rebuffs her advances, finding her amusing rather than attractive.
However, once Dunn realizes that she’s the Cisco Kid’s lover, he rides over to her house and starts wooing her. Naturally, he’s just leading her on so that he can find out more about where the Kid is, but she seems to fall for him very quickly. She’s offended when she finds out that he’s trying to earn the $500 reward for capturing or killing the Kid, but once he promises all of the money to her and tells her that he wants to take her back to New York to live, she makes an abrupt change in her emotions. The accent that Lowe uses throughout the film is quite horrible, by the way. It’s almost like a comic version of a New Yorker’s way of speaking.
The Cisco Kid overhears the plans that Dunn and Tonia make, including her desire to have Dunn kill the Kid rather than capture him. He’s heartbroken over this realization that she’s never really loved him (although she certainly liked the gifts he brought her), but he plans his revenge, and it’s a strange one. He intercepts a note she’s written to Dunn and changes it so that it seems he will be dressed up as Tonia and she will be dressed as the Cisco Kid. I’m not sure what prompts such an idea, but the alleged cross-dressing has its expected outcome. The Kid escapes after Dunn shoots and kills Tonia, who he thinks is the Cisco Kid wearing a white mantilla. I know, it sounds very odd, and it is very odd.
The film, being a product of its time, traffics in some offensive stereotypes about Mexicans and other Spanish-speaking people. Several sequences involve dialog that’s in Spanish, and it’s not translated for us on the screen. Instead, their speech ridiculed by the whites in the film. The white characters also use several derogatory terms for the Latinx people in the film (mostly women, by the way). Lest you think the film is only racist about the Latinx population, it also features a short image of two Asian characters talking rapidly during a sort of rally to get the townsfolks fired up about forming a vigilante posse to go after the Cisco Kid. Both of these characters are dressed like Hop Sing on the old Bonanza TV show. It’s tough to watch, but when even the central character of the Cisco Kid speaks with broken English despite the fact that his parents are both well educated, and one of them is from San Luis Obispo, you know the film isn’t going to treat all of its characters with dignity. Having white actors portray the Cisco Kid and Tonia Maria doesn’t help either, of course.
The film, as I mentioned earlier, was filmed mostly outdoors, and we are treated to some beautiful desert scenery. The opening sequence involving passengers boarding a stagecoach was clearly filmed at a mission (reportedly, the one at San Juan Capistrano), and lovely Joshua trees populate the landscape. The filmmakers have paid a great deal of attention to the look of the film, and even the interiors are shot with a good eye for art direction and set decoration. In Old Arizona harkens back to the early days of sound film and the various ways that the industry was trying to take what it had accomplished during the silent era and apply some of it to the new techniques of moviemaking. It’s good to see that the visual was not always abandoned at the service of the auditory.
Oscar Win: Best Actor (Warner Baxter)
Other Oscar Nominations: Outstanding Picture, Best
Director (Irving Cummings), Best Writing, and Best Cinematography
No comments:
Post a Comment