Jamaica Inn

Alfred Hitchcock’s last U.K. film before coming to Hollywood, Jamaica Inn (1939) was based on the Daphne du Maurier novel published three years earlier. The film stars Maureen O’Hara as the Irish orphan Mary and an over-the-top Charles Laughton as Sir Humphrey Pengallon, the corrupt country squire of the Cornish coast. Set during the 1820s, the film takes place in the isolated “Jamaica Inn,” a hideout for smugglers and pirates run by Mary’s aunt and uncle. O’Hara (Rio Grande, Our Man in Havana) and Laughton (Mutiny on the Bounty, Witness for the Prosecution) are fantastic, and the film provides an early look at the English actor Robert Newton, who played the unforgettable, visionary, and drunken artist in Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947). Featuring a hero dressed as a villain and a villain dressed as a hero, the film involves shipwrecks, double-crosses, hangings, sailor tattoos, eavesdropping, and meddling women, and also offers an implicit critique of the “public spectacle” of modern death on the eve of WWII, in which his native England will almost fall. The film involves many recognizable Hitchcock touches, from the lady with the goose to the gagged and bound heroine at the films denouement to lines like: “Take off your clothes off or I’ll do it for you!” O’Hara and Laughton later starred during the war in the French Resistance film This Land is Mine, directed by Jean Renoir in 1943.

Chess Fever

Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Chess Fever (1925) is a comedic classic of Soviet cinema that builds on early Russian silent cinema, not just upon the revolutionary impulses of October 1917. The film presents a domestic picture of wintry Moscow in the grip of “chess fever,” and includes both actual footage of an international chess tournament in Moscow that year as well as cameo appearances by famed chess stars of the day, such as the Cuban Jose Raul Capablanca (world champion 1921-1927). Chess Fever stars Anna Zemtsova (later billed as Anna Pudovkin) and Vladimir Fogel as they prepare, in much different fashion, for their wedding day. When Fogel’s obsession with chess—shared by the entire male population of the city, including the chemist who unwittingly mistakes lipstick and poison—tears apart their engagement, Fogel and Zemstiva must each evaluate what is truly important. Will a chance encounter with chess champion Capablanca (who prefers beautiful women to chess) save the day? The 27-minute Soviet silent features chess-loving kittens, checkered socks, and an attempted suicide.

After Hours

Martin Scorsese’s dark, postmodern comedy After Hours (1985) stars Griffin Dunne as computer programmer Paul Hackett, whose casual and nervous encounter with Rosanna Arquette leads him on a nightmare voyage through Soho’s dark and rainy streets. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, Hackett’s only thoughts are of finding an illusive and elusive way home “home”-- which in his case is back at work in his corporate office. On his journey through New York’s underground, where he encounters (but does not participate in) the libidinous world of drugs and sex, he will be tempted and tormented by an increasingly strange collection of women, from the trauma-inflicted Arquette to a sexually threatening sculptor played by Linda Fiorentino, from the obsessive, beehived, and potentially-castrating Teri Garr (who has access to a Xerox machine) to Catherine O’Hara (and her Mister Softee truck), and finally to the mysterious and maternal Verna Bloom, who lives in the basement of the Oz-like Club Berlin. Also features fantastic location shooting, mis-communication, repetition, an angry mob, and a cameo by Cheech and Chong. As a fantastic portrait of downtown in the early 1980s, After Hours is best viewed in conjunction with Downtown 81 or Permanent Vacation.

Ramona (1928)

Edwin Carewe’s Ramona, which cast Dolores Del Rio as the half-Scottish, half-Indian title character of this latest adaption of Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel, was produced by Inspiration Pictures and distributed by United Artists in 1928. Carewe had directed Del Rio three times before, including her first two films Joanna (1925) and High Steppers (1926), and Resurrection (1927). The film was described by Mordaunt Hall in the New York Times as an “extraordinarily beautiful production, intelligently directed and, with the exception of a few instances, splendidly acted. The scenic effects are charming and there is for the most part an admirable restraint throughout this drama of Southern California." Hall, who does not offer a direct comparison of her performance with that of Pickford’s, wrote that “Miss Del Rio’s interpretation of Ramona is an achievement. Not once does she overact, and yet she is perceived weeping and almost hysterical. She is most careful in all the moods of the character. Her beauty is another point in her favor.” In an earlier article about the film, the Times misidentified the national and ethnic heritages of both the character of Ramona, and of Del Rio herself. Writing that this is the “first time in her brief but rapid film career that Miss Del Rio has portrayed a character at least partly parallel to her own nationality,” the Times describes the character as “half Indian—half Spanish” and Del Rio as “a Mexican with Spanish blood in her ancestry.” In the story, however, Ramona is pointedly not half-Indian, half-Spanish (which would have made her ethnically “Mexican”) but is rather orphaned by her Scottish father. She is merely raised as a step-daughter by a “noble” Sevillian family living in California. As Victoria Sturtevant has shown, Del Rio’s performance in early films like The Loves of Carmen and Ramona gave her a more polished, elite, and Spanish image than Lupe Velez, the Mexican Spitfire. Her performance not only helped sustain the Ramona story’s enduring popularity, but was also a direct engagement with the growing Mexican American commercial market as a means to circumvent any forms of Mexican protest and boycott. More than simply cultivating a Mexican star, as we saw with The gaucho, the 1928 Ramona was produced during a period of the novel’s “discovery” by the Spanish-speaking Mexican American population of Los Angeles. Not only had the (still-ongoing) outdoor festival known as the Ramona Pageant premiered in Hemet, California in 1923, but an elaborate ten-part Ramona play ran at the Mexican American Teatro Hidalgo on N. Main Street in downtown Los Angeles during the twenties. This play's success was in turn trumped by Mexican novelist and playwright Adalberto Elias Gonzalez's Spanish-language play entitled Los Amores de Ramona, which opened in 1927 and seated nearly two thousand people per night in its initial run. Unlike previous strategies in getting around the Mexican protest without substantively altering their largely derogatory portrayals of Mexican characters, the 1928 version of Ramona could be marketed towards a built-in Mexican American audience. The Del Rio version, additionally, continued the long legacy of marketing that has surrounded the Ramona story as well. The silent film was “really the progenitor of the modern theme song,” and prior to the film’s completion “an astute sales manager named Emil Jensen summoned to his office at 729 Seventh Avenue in New York representatives of a music publishing house. He told them he was anxious to exploit a new Del Rio film in two ways: a Ramona rose, an artificial flower, would be manufactured and sold to film fans; and he wished a song composed, entitled ‘Ramona,’ and dedicated to the star.” The sheet music for the “Waltz song with ukulele and banjo uke” was written by Mable Lane and L. Wolfe Gilbert and featured a large picture of Del Rio on the cover, though the song was not included in the film.

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.

The Dove (1927)

Another film that demonstrates the ambiguity of the American response to Mexican protest was The Dove, released by Norma Talmadge Productions and distributed by United Artists in December of 1927. Set in the fictional Latin American nation of “Costa Roja,” The Dove was produced by Joseph Schenck, directed by Roland West, and starred Norma Talmadge in one of her last screen roles. The film was billed as a romantic melodrama and was based on a 1925 play by Willard Mack, which was in turn based on a short story called “The Blue Ribbon” by Gerald Beaumont, published in Red Book Magazine in 1923. Like The Bad Man, the Norma Talmadge silent was remade by RKO Radio Pictures in sound in 1931 as The Girl of the Rio, starring Mexican actress Dolores Del Rio, and again by RKO in 1939 as The Girl and the Gambler, starring the Hungarian-born actress Steffi Duna. While this transnational lineage of the character of Dolores ‘the Dove’ (later renamed Dolores ‘the Dove’ Romero in the 1939 version) is interesting, the Norma Talmadge version of the film was deeply engaged in Mexican protests over the representation of Mexicans in Hollywood movies. Indeed, it was for a time at the very center of the protests. Though films of the 1920s such as The Bad Man and The Dove continued to present derogatory stereotypes of Mexican villains, they each demonstrated the ploys that Hollywood used to soften their message. The growth of Mexico and Latin America as a viable market for films was a concern for both Hollywood and Washington. As Ulf Jonas Bjork has written, the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce (BFDC)—the agency in charge of trade promotion in the U.S. Department of Commerce—had established strong ties with Hollywood dating back to 1921. Bureau employee Clarence Jackson North was the point man in Washington for establishing the strong relationship with the film industry. His comment that “through American motion pictures, the ideals, culture, custom, and traditions of the United States are gradually” resulting in a “subtle Americanization process” in other countries mirrored Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover’s 1927 claim that American films were central in “transmitting ‘intellectual ideas and national ideals’ from the United States to other nations.” North’s primary contact in Hollywood was Frederick Herron, who worked for William Hays, the president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA).Hays, who had famously held that foreign trade “followed the film, not the flag,” was equally eager to assist the BFDC and profit from the extensive material and intellectual support that Hoover offered Hollywood in the realm of foreign trade and distribution. The Dove’s release in 1927 came during the same year that relations between the BFDC and MPPDA were at their closest, when North’s office began sending the Hollywood trade press weekly press releases and updates from his Commerce Reports, which had begun publishing film items and reports two years earlier. The Dove’s use of the fictional “Costa Roja” as a setting has been seen by historians as one of the most novel ploys by Hollywood to give attention to the expanding Latin American market, while leaving their biased narratives and imagery about Mexicans and Latin Americans largely unaltered. It was also viewed as a transparent at the time. In a January 3, 1928 review, the New York Times wrote that “geography” was meaningless to this “yarn,” noting that the producers “decided to pluck Mexicana from Mr. Mack’s original effort, call it Costa Roja and then fling it over to the blue Mediterranean.” The Times then explicitly connects The Dove to the Mexican protest, commenting that the lead male character Don Jose Maria y Sandoval, played by Noah Beery (modeled on the theatrical role played by “The Bad Man” star Holbrook Blinn), was “a screen character to which the Mexican Government may have objected to, for he is greedy, sensuous, boastful, cold-blooded, irritable, and quite a wine-bibber.” The review continues, however, by suggesting that Don Jose may not offend Mexican officials because, after all, “he does dress well . . . hates to have his luncheon spoiled by a noisy victim of his shooting squad [and] adores beauty.” Mexican politicians were not fooled by these (ostensibly) positive traits presented in the film and The Dove was the first high-profile attempt at economic boycott. As Wilbur Morse wrote in 1931, after years of “having its diplomatic representations so disregarded, Mexico took its first step toward definite action about two years ago when it barred Norma Talmadge’s silent version of The Dove. Soon, every film in which the villain said ‘carramba’ or was known as ‘Pancho’ or ‘Lopez’ was refused showing in any Mexican theater.” It is quite appropriate that Morse’s examples of derogatory Mexican names were the exact full name of Holbrook Blinn’s character in the Bad Man, for Mordaunt Hall, writing a second article about the film in the New York Times, declared that “this film should have been called ‘The Bad Man’s Brother’ instead of The Dove.”The Dove featured cinematic similarities to the Bad Man as well, including the same exaggerated Mexican accents used in the inter-titles of the 1923 film Not only does Don Jose speak in broken Spanish/English, proclaiming himself as the “Bes’ dam caballero in Costa Roja,” and commenting “Dios, what a man I am!,” but so too does the Dolores “the Dove” speak in a manner that even contemporary reviewers related to an attempt at a more subtle form of derision. “As you watch the scenes flash by,” Hall wrote, “it seems rather strange to perceive through the subtitles that Dolores talks in broken English when conversing with Don Jose, a fellow countryman. This is obviously done to give her the chance to use the expression, ‘You betcha my life!’ quite a number of times.”

The Bad Man (1923)

The image of Mexicans portrayed in The Bad Man (1923) contrasted heavily with that in The Mark of Zorro. Directed by Edwin Carewe (who later directed the 1928 version of Ramona starring Mexican actress Dolores Del Rio), the film starred Holbrook Blinn as the “notorious Mexican bandit Pancho Lopez,” in a revival of his stage performance as the Bad Man in the play by Porter Emerson Browne. The film is not, however, a return to the directly derogatory representation of Mexicans as dangerous villains or bandits that marked prior Hollywood films. Instead, as the New York Times wrote, this “clever and restrained . . . production” lost none of the whimsical humor of the play and Blinn, as the comic anti-hero Pancho Lopez, is “never at a loss for a smirk, a smile, a look of surprise, threatening gestures, or interest in what is going on around him. Blinn’s hands and feet appear to suit the very expression of his darkened countenance.” The film is a comedy that features the loyal Lopez, the mal hombre of yesteryear, defending the patriarch Gilbert Jones, who has once saved his life. By killing Morgan Pell, the rival of his friend Jones (and setting Jones up with Pell’s wife), Lopez is an allegorical stand-in for the mysterious and appealing side of Mexico and represents the complex tension of attraction and repulsion that marked relations between the United States and Mexico. It is not an irony that his very repulsive nature—the ability to kill—is also the source of his nobleness, albeit a naturalistic and primitive form of nobility. The Bad Man repeatedly undermines even this primitive nobility awarded Lopez by making the sound of his thick accent a featured part of the “silent” movie. As Melinda Szaloky has examined in an essay about F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927), visual acoustics as “a dimension of silent cinema that . . . does not originate from extrafilmic sound effects but, instead, issues from the images [of the films] themselves” is an underappreciated aspect of the silent film. When Lopez informs Morgan Pell that he is going to kill him, the inter-titles exaggerated the sound of his voice for the audience. Turning to his chief assistant, Lopez declares, “Pedro, I do not hunt rabbits—you keel heem.” According to the Times, the comedic effect was not lost on the audience, as the film was surely a “picture which sends one away joking about the lingo of the Bad Man.” When the film was remade in 1930 by First National Pictures, Walter Huston supplied in sound the exaggerated Mexican accent of the comedic anti-hero Pancho Lopez. The portrayal of Pancho Lopez in the film as a noble yet comic, murderous yet and unthreatening hero-villain came amidst increased pressures by the Mexican government to influence the representation of Mexicans in Hollywood films. Pressure came in the form of diplomatic protest and economic boycott, including the “ban on motion pictures which contain Mexican villains or incidents that may portray Mexican life unfavorably” that was delivered to Hollywood studios via Mexican General G.S. Seguin in 1922. The letter sent to the Hollywood studios by Seguin was not the first form of protest by the Mexican government, who had “long made efforts to control the image of Mexicans produced in the United States.” The Bad Man attempted to navigate official protests by the Mexican government by attempting to ennoble its comic villain-hero; it is Lopez’ actions, after all, that guarantees the happiness and love interest of the film’s American protagonist. But as Wilbur Morse, Jr. pointed out in a 1931 article in Motion Picture Classic, audiences inside and outside of the Mexican government were not fooled. Commenting on the remake of the Bad Man, Morse wrote that Walter Huston had given “an added sting to the lines which, as silent picture titles, had enraged the good citizens of our Sister Republic” in 1923. Mexican efforts at banning American films (and controlling the image of Mexicans) throughout the 1920s were undercut by a combination of external factors. These included the popularity of non-derogatory Hollywood films in Mexico, the sheer size and dominance of Hollywood productions, and by the conflicted needs of Mexican President Alvaro Obregon, who was president of Mexico from 1920-1924. Obregon was attempting to reconstruct the Mexican economy and political system and was forced to balance differing goals: the quest to avoid United States domination and the need for diplomatic recognition from the United States.