MOVIE REVIEW : Peck Shines as the ‘Old Gringo’

If you’ve ever yearned for the big movies of the ‘40s, lush and improbable, bolstered by the star turns of real movie stars, then just possibly “Old Gringo” (selected theaters) is your meat. Although its setting is the Mexican Revolution, in some ways it’s like one of those swaggering pirate epics where an unpredictable, reekingly macho brigand takes possession of his chaste woman captive, changing both their lives forever.

It does have a nicely unsentimental performance by one of its two certified movie stars, Gregory Peck, as the title character, the caustic and brilliant journalist Ambrose Bierce--who calls himself “Bitter” here. But somehow “Old Gringo” emerges, naive and pulsing, as a sexual fantasy of the Mexican Revolution, all sunsets and sumptuousness with a peculiarly split focus.

Things have been knocked out of whack by the fact that it was Jane Fonda who bought the rights to Carlos Fuentes’ novel and labored to get the film made, taking on the (then) subsidiary role of the novel’s 31-year-old spinster, Harriet Winslow. Fonda has called her “Old Gringo” “a movie about a woman who takes responsibility.” At any rate, she takes center stage. It might also be seen as “The Loves of the Not-So-Old Gringa,” torn between the young revolutionary general Arroyo (Jimmy Smits), who deflowers her, and the graceful, brilliant Bierce, who yearns to.

Harriet (age unspecified) impulsively leaves her tepid life in Washington, D.C., with her widowed mother for Mexico. She’s been hired as teacher to the children of the aristocratic Miranda family at their baronial hacienda. But the revolution arrives at the Mirandas’ doorstep before Harriet does. One of Pancho Villa’s regiments, headed by Gen. Arroyo, takes possession of the hacienda, forcing the Mirandas out and leaving Harriet stranded there, not a prisoner but a curious onlooker, attracted and repelled by the excesses of the upheaval around--and eventually within--her.

The Mirandas’ mirrored and parqueted palace is a magnet: for Harriet; for Arroyo, who is actually a Miranda himself, the bastard son of the landowner and a servant at the hacienda; and for the dry and witty Bierce, witnessing the final fire with knowing cynicism. (Every fire: the revolution’s, Harriet’s, Arroyo’s and his own.)

Arroyo becomes becalmed at the mansion in whose kitchens and servant’s quarters he was raised. Now virtually lord of the place himself, he finds it harder and harder to leave, to take his troops to Villa at the front. In this equation, Bierce, reluctantly, becomes sounding board and father figure to Arroyo and more of a father figure than he’d like to be to Harriet.

Bierce takes a little explaining to most modern audiences, who may have their curiosity raised and not quite answered by the film. He was an incisive writer with ideas well ahead of his time. He was a complicated man who rode alone into Mexico in 1913, when he was 71, to see the revolution for himself and disappeared without a trace. His fiction, with its overtones of the supernatural and of dreams (including “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”) captivated Fuentes, who put the old gringo at the heart of his story.

While the book is a parable, an intellectual game, the movie is about the birth of Harriet’s passion. The film doesn’t need Fuentes’ literary convolutions--these references are excess baggage here, properly stowed away by director-writer Luis Puenzo and his collaborator, Aida Bortnik. But what the film gives us instead is a stale romantic triangle of the ‘40s: Locked in the arms of her revolutionary leader, stoked and stroked by her elderly American journalist, Harriet will return to America a better person. It’s as if all that patting and prodding were an infusion of consciousness, not simple romantic and sexual fun.

Using Puenzo, the Argentine director who made “Official Story,” as director and co-writer presumably assured the film of a properly Latin feeling. Actually, in terms of the cultural differences between Argentina and Mexico, it was a little like hiring a New Yorker to write about New Mexico. But like a good researcher, Puenzo immersed himself in Mexican history, and the result, to these foreign eyes, seems at least respectful. It is certainly an elegant production (MPAA-rated R for its lyrical love scene and its adult themes).

The performance of the film is Peck’s, probably one of the best of his career. If he seems more an elegant rider than a hell-for-leather adventurer, so be it; he certainly conjures up the mysterious, complex Bierce. And for an embodiment of a romantic revolutionary leader, you probably couldn’t do better than Smits, either. (You might ask for clearer writing and editing near the film’s end to prepare us for his fate, however.) Jenny Gago seems a great find as La Garduna, the cheerful camp follower. Ironically Fonda, whose strength was what carried the film to the screen, seems at all times too strong a personality for the innocent Harriet, or even her later incarnation as Harriet La Passionara.

TV DOCUMENTARY

A review of a TV documentary on Carlos Fuentes, on whose novel the movie “Old Gringo” is based, is on Page 22.