CAPTAIN FROM CASTILE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 476, 6 August 1948, Page 24

CAPTAIN FROM CASTILE

(20th Century-f ox) O be strictly accurate Captain from Castile petered out a few miles short of the Halls of Montezuma and I didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry about it, for this flamboyant costume drama, which follows the fluctuating fortunes of a young Castilian hidalgo from the gardens of 16th Century Spain to the brave New World of Cortes and his Conquistadores (with a brief excursion en route to the dungeons of the Inquisition) illustrates beyond a _ peradventure both the technical competence and the intellectual poverty of- most Hollywood film-making. It is resplendently produced. Since it deals with a period of history which recognised two fair sexes, the wardrobe department has made a field-day of it and the colour-cameras dwell lingeringly »on richly-brocaded doublet, burnished morion, and Toledo blade. I suppose Velasquez might have improved on the Spanish interior settings, and perhaps Goya could better have. conveyed the atmosphere of the Inquisition’s torturechambers, but in the absence of both these experts the studio’s research and property departments have filled the breach handsomely. And some of the Mexican outdoor scenes are even more impressive. For the New World half of the film the shooting was done in Mexico’ itself, where the studio*had the co-operation of the Gevernment and the National Museum, and anyone familiar with Prescott, Madariaga, or The National Geographic Magazine will feel that Mexican antiquaries and studio researchers can have left no tome unturned to ensure the historical accuracy of native costume and architecture. There is no more dazzling spectacle in the film than’ the scene in which Cortes receives an Aztec embassy headed by Montezuma’s nephew, resplendent in a blue feathered headdress and carrying as much/ gold ornament as El Dorado himself. There is a panoramic quality.in the landscapes, too, a quality of space and emptiness and strangeness (ominous plumes of volcanic smoke in the far distance) which does suggest the state of wild surmise and suppressed excitement with which stout Cortes and his wild adventurers must have pressed onwards into the pnkronen interior, The technicians and the camera-men, in other words, have done their bestand it is not a bad best either. But add the dialogue to the photography and you have a good argument for a return to the silent film. It is surely ridiculous to spend so much money and talent on securing authenticity of costume and setting and then make no effort at all to ensure that the story wi'l sound authentic. It*is true that dates, places, and (in the main) events conform to history, but conspicuously absent are the thoughts and attitudes of the 16th Century. And I can’t for the life of me see why these shouldn’t be as picturesque, as interesting, and even as exciting as the costumes and customs of the period. As far as I am concerned, they could not possibly be as annoying as Hollywood’s persistent advertisement

of America as the last stronghold of liberty. This naive propaganda line (for which we are no doubt indirectly indebted to the leng-armed Committee for the Investigation of Un-American Activities) crops up in the most unexpected places. , Its exponents in the present instance are Lee Cobb, a dipsomaniac swashbuckler ("In’ the Noo World it’s what you are, not who you are that counts’); Jean Peters (‘a wench for the Noo World") who attaches herself, as a sort of personal maid, to Tyrone Power while he is in Old Castile but -manages to marry him in the democratising atmosphere of Mexico; and Thomas Gomez, Cortes’ chaplain who sounds like a blend of Buchmanism and Social Justice. If America were the last home of democracy this would still be a peculiarly irritating form of ideological narcissism. However, those who are less: touchy on such matters, and whose notion of what constitutes good acting is less exacting than my own, will no doubt find Captain from Castile a satisfying show. It is a long film (long enough, I noticed, for Tyrone Power to. grow a moustache), with all the conventional ingredients-the conventionally handsome hero, the conventionally sinister villain, the indispensable pursuit on horseback, the discreet modicum of off-stage torture (sadism by second intention, as it were), and the inevitable duel. Mr. Power, who has a fair seat as a horseman and the right figure for doub!et-and-hose, will remain, I have no doubt, as popular as ever with the bobby-soxers. ? But, as a friend pointed out, with all those knights of Old Castile sculling around, the sudsy atmosphere of soap opera was unavoidable.