Robert Rodriguez is a local Austin hero. As a film maker, he has worked extensively in the Austin area and used local crafts people and locations for his films. He has been able to select a group of movies for the Summer Classic Film Series, and present them to the audience with a live introduction for a few years now. This last Sunday, he had three films that he wanted to talk about that featured Mexican Actor/Director Alfonso Arau. Rodriguez was inspired by Arau when he was just starting out and he got a break, which allowed him to spend a week or so as a young man, assisting and hanging out with Arau. They have since become friends and it is fitting that Rodriguez selected his friend to feature in this summer's presentations.
There were actually three features on Sunday that concerned Arau, unfortunately, we could not stay for the film he directed "Like Water for Chocolate". I have it in my collection and we will catch up with it soon. The two films we were able to see were movies that Alfonso Arau had an acting role in. He is not the star of the films but he is an important featured player in both of them
Romancing the Stone
"Romancing the Stone" was 20th Century Fox's entry into the Indiana Jones clone films. Everyone was looking for an adventure film with comedy, romance and stunts, to pull in audiences the way the Steven Spielberg films had done. The movie was a big success and it cemented the stardom of Kathleen Turner and created a partnership with Michael Douglas that would continue up to today. If you are interested in a more detailed look at the film, let me direct you to my post on the 30 Years On Project. This movie is a delightful summer entertainment, and holds up pretty well.
First lets talk about Alfonso Arau's part in the film. He plays the role of a drug smuggler, who controls the local area that Romance Writer, Joan Wilder (Turner) and her guide/partner, Jack Colton (Douglas) find themselves stuck in. Through one of those wonderful movie coincidences, he knows her work and becomes a quick ally in her goal of escaping from the evil pursuers that are hot on their trail. The vast majority of his role involves him grinning as he drives them in his off road truck through the fields and jungles as they are chased by jeeps with machine guns. Arau is probably not in the movie for more than seven or eight minutes, but like most good character actors, he makes those minutes count. 
I also have to say that Kathleen Turner was the draw in the film. Douglas was the producer and first listed star on the film, but Turner is the character that we spend the most time with. She starts off as a mousy pawn in the story, but as her successes in confronting complications grow, so does her self confidence and natural beauty. By the end of the film, she has truly become the heroine of her own romance novels. It's pretty obvious that Michael Douglas also worked in the film as adventurer Colton. This movie set him up as a romantic lead for the next twenty years, in thrillers and dramas as well as comedies.
The cast also included Danny DeVito, who was a buddy of Michael Douglas after appearing in the Academy Award winning "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" which Douglas produced. He later directed both of the stars in the excellent but sometimes forgotten "War of the Roses". So it was a fortuitous collaboration for all involved. Director Robert Zemeckis had had a hand in three films that had bombed for Steven Spielberg and his production company. He took this job to try and get a hit outside of the Spielberg umbrella, so his career did not dissipate. Robert Rodriguez told us as part of his introduction to the film that Zemeckis had said this was the hardest location shoot he had ever done, and that he instructed his agent that if ever he was given a script that started "Exterior: A vast Jungle", the agent should just automatically pass.
The Three Amigos !
The second of our Double Features includes a much bigger role for Alfonso Arau. He is the antagonist in the story, a bandit named El Guapo, modelled after the character played by Eli Wallach in "The Magnificent Seven". Of course this is a comedy, so the character will have a number of features that would not likely appear in a real bandit of this ilk, including a love of sweaters. John Landis directed this film and it is a loose adaption of "The Magnificent Seven" and "The Seven Samurai". A village, terrorized by a gang of bandits, seeks outsiders as defenders. The conceit in this film is that the woman who contacts the supposed heroes, has misunderstood what a movie is (the film is set in 1916). The three actors who star in a series of Westerns set in Mexico during the silent film era, are playing landowners who are heroically on the side of peasants in many of their films. When the actors lose their jobs at the studio, they take up an ambiguous offer from the woman in the village, a heavily edited telegram leads them to think they are putting on a show, not that they are confronting real criminals.
Of course the film is pretty silly at times. There is a singing bush, a singing tortoise and singing horses in the film. There is also an invisible swordsman, and the actors skills as action stars in the movies, turn out to be useful. The cross cultural jokes are not offensive, and it's hard to be put off by anything the three leads do. Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and Martin Short are the three actors who get in over their heads. The sequence where they realize the reality of their situation is quite amusing, and they do a nice cowardly retreat that will provoke a smile or two. The consistent smile generator however is the Amigos salute, you can probably do it yourself if you have seen the movie. 
Alfonzo Arau gets to ham it up as the leader of the bandit gang, and he gets a lot of mileage out of his broad smile and subdued line readings. If you have seen this movie before, you will probably remember the dialogue that features a "plethora" of jokes about the meaning of the word. Actor Tony Plana plays "Jefe" the second in command to "El Guapo" and he and Arau have some nice timing in their scenes together.
This is a lightweight movie, that has nothing on it's mind other than making us laugh at some absurdities, and it does that just fine. It is the only screenwriting credit that composer/songwriter Randy Newman has, that may be in large part because of the songs he contributed to the story, although he is also credited as contributing to the payoff joke of the birthday presents for El Guapo, so I won't say he was not writing outside of the songs.
It was a minor hit at Christmas time in the year of it's release, but it has never been a critical favorite. It is probably fair to say, that like a lot of other 1980s movies, it achieved a reputation because of repeated cable showings and now has a cult following. It's nonsensical and sweet, with enough energy for it's running time.
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