Five for the entertainment spectacle in this TV movie that idealises Hollywood when it was not even in California and still had its studios in New Jersey, just near the investors in Wall Street. It's a cracking piece of film-making, and the pecuniary motives of the 1914 producers are frankly enough portrayed, plus the cynical motives of Wall Street financiers are mocked, if weakly. The script even admits that the studio sold out the truth in its trashy, commercialised exploitations of the Pancho Villa armed insurgency.
But not another five for the deception that lies within. This film comes with the blithe implication that Hollywood could make such a film today, about insurgents rising up against the property hierarchy, when such a thing is unthinkable. If there existed before World War One a raffish romanticism about remote uprisings, and a willingness to cheek the mainstream media, that spirit is now as departed as the silent picture.
It is as vanished as the archive copies of the original Pancho Villa silent-features, which were doubtless destroyed once the campesinos had been pacified and all trace of Pancho Villa, their hero, could be quietly wiped from the public record, something that happened in Mexico (and doubtless on Wall Street) as the film has the grace to admit.
But not another five for the deception that lies within. This film comes with the blithe implication that Hollywood could make such a film today, about insurgents rising up against the property hierarchy, when such a thing is unthinkable. If there existed before World War One a raffish romanticism about remote uprisings, and a willingness to cheek the mainstream media, that spirit is now as departed as the silent picture.
It is as vanished as the archive copies of the original Pancho Villa silent-features, which were doubtless destroyed once the campesinos had been pacified and all trace of Pancho Villa, their hero, could be quietly wiped from the public record, something that happened in Mexico (and doubtless on Wall Street) as the film has the grace to admit.