The Gaucho (1927)

Starring Douglas Fairbanks and Mexican actress Lupe Velez, The Gaucho was released in 1927 as “The Gaucho Starring Douglas Fairbanks” to largely positive reviews that noted, nonetheless, “a rather gruesome undertone to an otherwise gay symphony.” The film’s Argentine setting allowed Fairbanks to operate in an essentially Zorro-like adventure plot that ostensibly skirted Mexican concerns, with the Andean highlands functioning in the same manner as the fictive Costa Roja. Released a month earlier than The Dove, Fairbanks’ film contained many explicit allusions to Mexican themes and images. As a return to the hero-bandit formula that Fairbanks had helped popularize with The Mark of Zorro (and the 1924 sequel Don Q, Son of Zorro), The Gaucho pits Fairbanks against a greedy, corrupt, drunken, and ineffectual state government, ruled in this case by Ruiz, the usurper, played by German actor Gustav von Seyffertitz. Armed with an Argentine bolas that replaces Zorro’s sword, Fairbanks must the native peasants with the elite ruling class, which, in this case, is represented by the Catholic Church. The film adds the specter of infectious disease as a plot twist that differentiates The Gaucho from previous incarnations of this Ramona and Zorro theme of a corrupt state unable to protect its land, women, or gold. Infected with the “Black Doom,” a leprosy-like disease, that the state has been unable to successfully quarantine, The Gaucho finds his religious calling via a ghostly vision of the Virgin Mary (played by Mary Pickford) at the City of the Miracle. Following his miraculous cure from the Black Doom at the shrine of Mary (aka Our Lady of Guadalupe), the Gaucho leads the people against Ruiz and his corrupt and inebriated army. Like in the Zorro films, Fairbanks’ own celebrity operates as part of the narrative as well. It was not only reinforced by the apparition of Mary Pickford but by the Gaucho’s magnetic appeal to common men and women alike. Not only does Velez, as the Mountain Girl, fawn over the Gaucho’s pictures on her wall and decorate herself with make-up when he visits her small town, but when we are introduced to the Gaucho/Fairbanks he is signing autographs in a local cantina. Though the film is in many ways reflects the basic Zorro narrative, it cinematographically recalls the visual language employed by D.W. Griffith’s Ramona in 1910, as sweeping long-shots of the landscape and natural beauty of this simpler time and place are fore-fronted in The Gaucho. Compared to The Mark of Zorro, the film featured a toned-down version of the arched doorways, bleached-white walls, and ornate tile work representative of the same Spanish-style architecture and interior design that was popular in 1920s California, as modern local boosters were reshaping Southern California in this Spanish/Mexican hybrid vision by re-constructing historical sites such as Olvera Street (a Mexican marketplace billed as the oldest street in Los Angeles) and the El Camino Real. The styling was somewhat subdued in the film, in part reflecting the larger trend of 1920s set design. As Simon Dixon has argued, 1920s set design was involved in a visual discourse with celebrity homes, and film magazines like Photoplay featured lavish photo spreads on estates like Marion Davies’ San Simeon-by-the-Sea “Ocean House,” Rudolph Valentino’s “Falcon Lair” in Beverly Hills, and Fairbanks and Pickford’s own Spanish-styled house, called “Pickfair,” that Fairbanks and Pickford constructed in 1927, the same year that The Gaucho premiered, in an elite and exclusively white subdivision of Rancho Santa Fe, just north of San Diego, California. This is more than conjecture: “Pickfair” was discussed in the film’s original program book as well as in newspaper articles as the new home of the over 600 head of longhorn cattle that Fairbanks purchased for the pivotal stampede scene near the end of the film. Such discussions of Fairbanks’ extravagant spending on The Gaucho was not merely a nod to his own celebrity but were also an attempt to elevate the film’s critical appeal and cultural significance. Again mirroring the film’s official program book, newspapers lauded The Gaucho’s high production costs while, simultaneously, commenting on Fairbanks’ creativity and genius as a producer. Sections of the program called “When Fairbanks Gets An Idea” and “Things Only Fairbanks Can Do” were printed in the New York Times leading up to the film’s release, including a discussion of the construction of the massive set of the City of the Miracle, which included an 800-foot street and the development of a camera lens that “would picture such a street in a way that all parts of it, down to the pilgrims entering the shrine at the end.” The establishing shot of the village, consisting of a long backwards pan, was an impressive innovation that, according to the Times, was an example of how “Fairbanks’s fanciful notions of one sort or another in his new picture come into reality” and were “the sort of thing that has given him name for accomplishing in a seemingly easy manner some seemingly impossible technical problems.” The film’s program book that went to great lengths to explain that an Argentine gaucho was not very different from a Mexican caballero. The “gaucho of yesterday,” the program informs us, “was a romantic, audacious guerilla of the plains.” He was “tall, handsome, and lighter-skinned than the North American Indians, but with black eyes.” As “King of the Pampas,” he was an “excellent cattleman and a savage fighter . . . a fierce, uncompromising son of Spanish-Indian stock,” a “picturesque figure” in “flamboyant” clothing armed with the traditional weapon of choice, a bolas. The program then notes that Fairbanks has taken some poetic liberties with the historical presentation of the Gaucho, believing, as he does, that “’things as they are’ are never as appealing as ‘things as we would like them to be.” That the program comments on the light skin of the Argentine gaucho is rather surprising considering the dark make-up that Fairbanks wears in the film. But, as Paula Marantz Cohen has written, Fairbanks’ skin tone was one of the many closely controlled aspects of his on and off screen image that he and Pickford adeptly and closely controlled. Fairbanks, who was a quarter Jewish, had skin “far darker than that of the conventional leading men of the period,” and negotiated this darkness in his earlier roles by lightening his skin with a heavy layer of white make-up. But in his later films set in “exotic” Mexican, South American, or Arabian locale (such as The Gaucho), Cohen argues that Fairbanks pioneered the use of sun-tanning his skin even darker to not only to connect his character with the illicit and foreign persona he is portraying, but also to navigate his own darkness by “normalizing a look that would otherwise have marginalized him in mainstream culture.” Neither The Gaucho’s narrative and visual connections to Zorro and Ramona, nor the use of its pointedly non-Mexican setting as in The Dove, nor its focus (like Zorro) on Fairbanks’ own celebrity were the most significant aspects of the film to our understanding its complex and ambiguous response to the heightened Mexican pressure of derogatory depictions in Hollywood films. Perhaps most crucial to the way the film engages with Mexican protest was in the film’s cast, with the introduction of Lupe Velez in her first starring role. Of course, it should be noted, Velez was not the only Mexican in the film. Indeed, as the New York Times wrote, “most” of The Gaucho’s “cantankerous bandits . . . are Mexicans, to whom the bolas was as unfamiliar as croquet to an American Indian or baseball to an Eskimo.” Velez, who was born in San Luis Potosí, Mexico and educated in Texas, inaugurated an exaggerated version of the “Mexican Spitfire” character she was most known for. Although Dolores Del Rio had broken into Hollywood movies two years earlier, it was Velez’s portrayal of the star-struck/love-smitten Mountain Girl whose performance inaugurated the stereotype of the hot-blooded (and specifically) Mexicana whose uncontrollable passions are, in the end, subdued by a dominant man. Velez’s passion smolder as The Gaucho literally intertwines the pair with his bolas in a suggestive dance in the cantina where they first meet, but are aroused to their fiery fullest as a rival appears for the affections her “Gaucho mio.” Velez, who was quick to fight women rivals, other men in the Gaucho’s gang, or even the Gaucho himself (often biting or slapping him and getting bitten or slapped back in an extremely casual presentation of domestic violence in which love, anger, and passion are intertwined), was praised in film reviews. She was acclaimed for her performance as a peasant girl who, even when civilized in fine clothing, does not overcome the hot fervor of her station. She was perfect in the role of the Latina “termagant, quickly fired to anger. Whether she is in rags or laces she gives blow for blow to the men who get in her way or incur her anger . . . never heeding for an instant that she is arrayed in silks and laces.” Even the reviewer noted that although “Miss Velez gives a capital characterization . . . it does seem strange that she is so suddenly tamed in the end, when she becomes the bride of the Gaucho.” As Carlos Cortes has shown, the pairing of a Mexican female character and Anglo man had long been an acceptable pairing in Hollywood films, as long as the white man was successfully able to tame his Mexican or Indian bride. The casting of a Mexican actress to serve as Fairbanks’ onscreen bride was an important development in Hollywood’s response to ongoing protests. The development of a Mexicana star not only reflected a calculated decision in ethnic marketing that reflected the increased distribution into the Mexican and Latin American markets as well as the growing purchasing power of Mexican American audiences. It also served to inherently temper Mexican criticism, as a film featuring a Mexican movie star could be popular even if the character portrayed presents a negative or derogatory stereotype, the feature at the very heart of Mexican complaint about Hollywood films dating back a decade. As Laura Serna has written, when The Gaucho premiered at the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, theater magnate Sid Grauman attempted to exploit the Mexcana star’s popularity with the Mexican American population in Los Angeles and “organized a special event in honor of Velez, who had just signed a five-year contract with United Artists, called Fiesta de Mexico in the English language advertisement.” The event, though a blatant attempt to connect Mexico with the film’s Argentine setting, was a failure. Velez, however, proved to be extremely popular with both Mexican and Anglo audiences and critics alike. In fact, two years later, in a less than stellar review of a Lupe Velez film that paired her with Gary Cooper, the Times laments the loss of some of the passionate temper than Velez displayed in The Gaucho. “The exotic and curiously attractive Mexican actress,” they wrote, “…is now to be seen as a more placid but not wiser young woman” in a film called Wolf Song (1929). Velez had not been Douglas Fairbanks’ first choice for The Gaucho. After seeing Dolores Del Rio in Edwin Carewe’s Resurrection during a private screening for Mary Pickford and her mother, Fairbanks had inquired as to her availability. Carewe informed the swashbuckling star that the twenty-two year-old Del Rio was already signed to star in Carewe’s remake of Ramona, which would go into production at the end of the year. The role of the Mountain Girl then went to Velez, who had arrived in California the year before following many Mexican stage roles, and was, herself, originally considered for the lead in The Dove the year before.