MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Break of Dawn’ Requires Too Little of Its Audience

Producer Jude Pauline Eberhard’s and writer-director Isaac Artenstein’s “Break of Dawn” is a movie for people whose intellect is equipped with cruise control. You have to be alert for five or 10 minutes to get a fix on its intentions, then you just sit back and watch the road.

Nothing more is required of its audience, least of all a conscience. In re-enacting this true story about an immigrant Mexican balladeer whose growing political influence in Depression-era Los Angeles got him railroaded into San Quentin on a bogus rape charge, the film makers worked up enough moral outrage for us all.

What happened to Pedro J. Gonzales was an outrage, and the fact that he has never been pardoned, despite his accuser’s recantation of her testimony nearly 50 years ago, is an ongoing outrage. But “Break of Dawn” does such a thorough job of venting its own spleen that we never get a chance to let the bile rise in ours.

The movie, made on a shoestring budget in San Diego County (it begins its world-premiere run tonight at the Guild Theatre in Hillcrest), picks up Pedro and Maria Gonzalez as they cross the Mexican-American border in 1928 and follows them through the events that made Pedro first a Latino radio star in Los Angeles, then a convict at San Quentin.

Pedro, now 93, and Maria, 85, live in Nestor near San Ysidro, and their story has been told before, in a 1984 PBS documentary that Artenstein directed and edited. What happened to Pedro in Los Angeles, and the six years he spent in prison, are tragedies in a marriage that began during the Mexican Revolution and, as of Thursday, has lasted 69 years.

The accompanying stories by Elaine Pofeldt and Kevin Brass detail some of the events of Pedro and Maria’s life together and the obsession that led Artenstein (with producer Eberhard) to get “Break of Dawn” made. It was a herculean effort, and the film’s $1-million price tag is a bargain by any measure.

The failures of “Break of Dawn” are not of technique. Artenstein has a sure visual sense, and he got from Mexican singer-actor Oscar Chavez the performance he needed most. Chavez is not the matinee idol a major studio would have insisted on (and which helps explain why the movie is still without a distributor), but his Gonzalez has both the magnetism and music ability to make his quick rise as America’s first Latino radio star plausible. Whatever else is to be said for “Break of Dawn,” the sound track ought to be on sale in the lobby.

Chavez and the score are just two of several assets the film has to boast. By choosing its San Diego locations carefully, and by mixing in apparently colorized pre-1930s stock Los Angeles street footage, the film makers captured the period as well as could be done on a normal budget.

The film’s overriding problem is its heavy-handed approach in castigating the provincial forces at work against Gonzalez and the other Latinos who freely crossed into the United States, only to face the hostile forces of American workers and politicians who viewed them as direct threats.

On his radio show and in his ballads (about half of the film’s dialogue is in Spanish with English subtitles), Gonzalez alludes to the bitterness some Mexicans felt at being treated as foreigners on what was once their own land.

But, if Artenstein had intentions beyond showing how much hope the Mexican emigres brought with them to the United States, and the odds against those hopes being realized, they were sacrificed to the film’s broader ambitions toward entertainment.

Artenstein is a skillful documentarian with an understandable passion for his subject. But in making the transition to feature film, he has made the mistakes of telling his audience too much, of painting his characters and conflicts in the broadest dramatic strokes.

The bad guys of “Break of Dawn” are grotesque, racist gargoyles who emit every sinister clue but fangs. As the crooked L.A. district attorney who attempts to corrupt Pedro with political immunity, Peter Henry Schroeder is the very incarnation of evil. The last time I saw a villain like this in a movie, he was wearing a thin black mustache and tying a girl in bloomers to a railroad track.

There are other nefarious and, in the movie sense, cliched characters lined up against Pedro, including a slew of cops, an unctuous prosecutor and a judge who is a wholly owned subsidiary of the DA’s office. In the wide middle ground between good and evil are the Mexicans--a troubled 15-year-old girl, a flaky prostitute and a corrupt cop--who conspire to build a rape case against Pedro.

Pedro is not treated as a complete saint. The movie makes it clear that he spent the break of a few dawns with a lusty tango dancer who was anxious to massage more than his ego. But, if his wife doesn’t throw him out, why should we? And we have seen it happen in movies before where success and opportunity combine to temporarily weaken a man’s knees. We sure have.

Eberhard and Artenstein, partners in Cinewest Productions, have pulled off a small miracle in rounding up the financing for a movie as--in this era of macho excess and mindless special effects--commercially dubious as “Break of Dawn.” And there are certainly enough flashes of real talent here to suggest the beginnings of a long career in features.

I just wish that, with “Break of Dawn,” they had taken less upon themselves and left a little for their audience.

“BREAK OF DAWN”

A Cinewest film. Produced by Jude Pauline Eberhard. Written and directed by Isaac Artenstein. Camera, Stephen Lighthill. Editor, John Nutt. Music, Mark Adler. Production design, Don DeFina. Costumes, Marianna Astrom-DeFina. Art direction, Celeste Lee. Sound, Anne Evans. With Oscar Chavez, Maria Rojo, Tony Plana, Pepe Serna, Peter Henry Schroeder, Socorro Valdez, Kamala Lopez.