Alfonso Arau Movies
Mexican actor and director Alfonso Arau's first American film role was as bloodthirsty bandit Herrera in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969), a role he would later parody (albeit with a straight face) in the 1986 comedy Three Amigos! U.S. filmgoers were by and large unaware that Arau had long been a popular vaudeville, theater, and TV performer, and had built his Mexican film reputation as an independent producer/director, beginning with 1969's The Barefoot Eagle. Arau reached the plateau of art-house idolatry when he decided to adapt a novel about the mystical aspects of gourmet cooking, written by his wife Laura Esquivel. The subsequent film, Like Water for Chocolate (1993), ended up as one of the most profitable foreign movies ever exhibited in America and won a number of international awards as well as multiple Silver Ariels, Mexico's equivalent of the Oscar. Arau followed Like Water for Chocolate with A Walk in the Clouds two years later. Arau's first American film as a director, it starred Keanu Reeves as a WWII veteran who poses as the husband of a pregnant young woman in order to help her preserve her standing within her family. Despite great anticipation surrounding its release, the film proved to be a critical and commercial disappointment. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
"If they move, kill 'em!" Beginning and ending with two of the bloodiest battles in screen history, Sam Peckinpah's classic revisionist Western ruthlessly takes apart the myths of the West. Released in the late '60s discord over Vietnam, in the wake of the controversial Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and the brutal "spaghetti westerns" of Sergio Leone, The Wild Bunch polarized critics and audiences over its ferocious bloodshed. One side hailed it as a classic appropriately pitched to the violence and nihilism of the times, while the other reviled it as depraved. After a failed payroll robbery, the outlaw Bunch, led by aging Pike Bishop (William Holden) and including Dutch (Ernest Borgnine), Angel (Jaime Sanchez), and Lyle and Tector Gorch (Warren Oates and Ben Johnson), heads for Mexico pursued by the gang of Pike's friend-turned-nemesis Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan). Ultimately caught between the corruption of railroad fat cat Harrigan (Albert Dekker) and federale general Mapache (Emilio Fernandez), and without a frontier for escape, the Bunch opts for a final Pyrrhic victory, striding purposefully to confront Mapache and avenge their friend Angel. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, (more)
- 1969
Mexico City does not hold jobs for two actors as related in this story. ~ All Movie Guide
