Movies - Zapata Westerns

Home > Listing Index > Movies > Zapata Westerns

	Movies - Zapata Westerns

Zapata Westerns, nickname given to a subgenre of the so-called Italian "Spaghetti Westerns" which dealt with overtly political themes in the mid-to-late 1960s. They were named after Emiliano Zapata, the famous Mexican revolutionary from the Mexican Revolution of 1913, during which most of these films took place.

The term is also occasionally applied to many American Westerns which took place during this time period, including Jack Conway and Howard Hawks's Viva Villa!
(1934), with Wallace Beery, Elia Kazan's Viva Zapata!
(1952), with Marlon Brando and Anthony Quinn, and Robert Aldrich's Vera Cruz (1954), with Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster, though these films rarely dealt with significant political themes, as did their later Italian counterparts.

Overview/Origins

Most of the early Spaghetti Westerns, such as the early works of Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci, dealt with some subtle political themes, particularly a criticism of Western capitalism and the "dollars" culture of America; however, as a general rule they were secondary to the main plot of the films in question during the early stage of the genre's development in the mid-'60s. However, in the late '60s a number of left-wing directors began to shoot Spaghetti Westerns as political allegories, often using the Western setting to mask (to an extent) the intended political outlook, in order to make them more acceptable (to some extent).

One of the first popular political Westerns, still highly regarded as one of the genre's best, was Sergio Sollima's 1966 film The Big Gundown, with Lee Van Cleef and Tomas Milan. The original screenplay had originally involved an Italian police detective, ordered to chase down a Communist revolutionary accused of raping and killing an industrialist's wife, only to find that the revolutionary had been framed by the industrialist - but he kills the revolutionary anyway. Sollima took the story line, transplanted it to 1880's Colorado, and changed the film's ending to a considerably more happy one.

In the same year, Damiano Damiani released A Bullet For The General (also known as Quien Sabe?), with Gian Maria Volonte, Lou Castel, and Klaus Kinski, which dealt with an American agent of the Mexican government (Castel), during the Mexican Revolution of 1913, being hired to manipulate a bandit leader (Volonte) into helping him assassinate a revolutionary general. The movie made overt references to the ongoing Vietnam War, and Castel's character was meant to represent the CIA's interventions in Latin America. The movie was extremely popular in Europe, though butchered both for political and content reasons in overseas markets, and set the precedent for the development of the subgenre.

Regular Plot Devices

A general outline of a standard Zapata Western plot went as follows:

The two main characters would be an ignorant Mexican bandit peon who knows nothing about the politics of revolution, and an outsider - American, European, or Irish - who is in some way involved in the revolution. The bandit would usually, though not always, have a large gang of followers who would be used as expendable fodder for the movie's action scenes, and to represent his ties to his friends and families, rather than to any abstract idea of revolution.
The setting would most often be the Mexican Revolution of 1913, particularly during the reign of General Victoriano Huerta.
In most films, the outsider manipulates the peon and his gang into joining the revolution, for his own personal gain, for the benefit of an outside influence, or often for the outsider's own amusement.
The villain is usually an American mercenary (often times the foreigner), a fascist-like Mexican general, or an American or otherwise foreign (in Leone's A Fistful of Dynamite
, a German) corporation.

Virtually all political Westerns, Zapata or not, were made from a Marxist point of view, and extensively referenced the fascist regimes of Benito Mussolini in Italy (under whom most of the film makers had lived) and Adolf Hitler in Germany. They also frequently criticized contemporary US foreign policy, particularly the Vietnam War and the role of the US military and intelligence in Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Zapata Westerns ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Zapata Westerns; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay