Cinema
Tex-Mex
Peter Ackroyd
Gregorio Cortez (' Is', Electric Screen, Portobello Road)
This film has been adapted from a book with the exciting title With His Pistol in His Hand, and is apparently based upon a series of events in Texas at the turn of the century; a ballad was composed upon the subject, at least, although the Irish ex- perience teaches us that this in itself is not a guarantee of authenticity. The titular character is a young Mexican who, suspected of murdering the local sheriff, is Pursued by the Texas Rangers; he takes to the wilderness, successfully evades capture for a while, but is eventually taken and tried. This theme of flight and pursuit is an old one but the old ones are often the best not only does it provide a convenient framework for almost any conceivable adventure but it also touches upon the fears and dreams of an audience as the hunted figure stares wildly around. In Gregorio Cortez the usual pattern is firmly estab- lished — flight, fatigue, imminent capture, escape, endurance, depression are its elements — and yet although, at this late date, there may not seem to be many varia- tions possible on the spectacle of one man °I1 a horse being chased by several men on horses the director of the film, Robert M. V°ung, has been able to raise the general 1 L'e,vel of such entertainments a notch or two nigher. His attitude, for example, is much more level and anecdotal than that of most 1/urveyors of 'westerns', and by eschewing conventional heroics he provides something much more confused, disobliging and sometimes vicious. This is partly because he has decided to be as 'factual' as possible; and the physical details are so unfamiliar that they mitigate against the familiarity of the theme. There will not be many people in the Electric Screen, for example, who will know the posture to adopt when sleeping in the saddle. This film will teach them. The Texas Rangers 'themselves look as close to the real thing as one would care to see; they have that air of casual virility which is so appealing to the young, and all of them seem to possess that authentic frown (close to a squint) which has no doubt been copied from old photographs as if they were perpetually looking into the sun. Edward James Olmos, as Cortez, is allowed to be rather more expressive; he first appears as a debonair young Mexican of indeterminate age and employment, but the pursuit wears him down until finally he becomes aged and sallow. He does not speak English in the film but he hardly needs to: his sighs and groans are testimony enough to the ordeal through which he is passing. But the film is also noticeable for its less grandiloquent moments: in one agreeable little scene, a lonely cowboy, starved of human company, talks endlessly to the Mexican despite the fact that the hunted man does not understand a word he is saying. Certainly Texas itself is enough to induce loneliness in. even the most resolute native: as the sun sinks slowly in the western, an orange light suffuses the screen and the land itself resembles nothing so much as a desert (which in part it is). 'It's a mighty big country,' one of the Rangers explains, in that laconic manner now gener- ally employed by waiters in Tex-Mex restaurants. The care lavished on the historical detail of this film is more than usually important since the precise period in which it is set has a great deal to do with its theme: the turn of the century apparently being the period in which Texas finally faced up to its loss of independence and became an integral part of the United States. Although we might be supposed to be watching one of many disputes involving Americans and Mexi- cans, Robert Young is at least able to sug- gest by indirection the racial tension which exists between the two distinct cultures which still existed there — if either Cortez or the Texas Rangers can, in their raw state, really be said to possess any 'culture'. It transpires that the fatal shooting of the sheriff was in fact based upon a simple linguistic misunderstanding between the Mexican and the American — the latter us- ing the word 'horse' for both sexes of that animal, and the former having a word for either sex. Cortez, mistaking the nature of the sheriff's question, shoots him — the ad- mirers of Esperanto will here wave their banners vigorously, although in fact most quarrels are based upon verbal mistakes of one kind or another. Cortez is tried for his own mistake and, despite the fact that the prosecuting lawyer demands the death penalty, he is sentenced instead to 50 years in prison (in real life, if it is not impertinent to mention such a thing in a cinema review, it seems that Cortez was released sooner rather than later). The local deputy saves him from the attentions of a lynching mob, and the last sequences of the film show him being taken on a train to the state peniten- tiary — the train itself offering a clue to the fact that the old order from which Cortez and the Rangers sprang is at last coming to an end.
And that happy epitaph is in fact the cen- tral theme, of the film: the lynch mob goes away dissatisfied, the railways are slicing the prairies, and America is, as they say, `coining of age'. Gregorio Cortez might on the surface seem to offer a fashionably liberal view of the oppressed Mexican, and of his fate at the hands of churlish American law-givers (a popular subject in the cinema of the Sixties and Seventies), but in fact it is a patriotic piece of work which manages both to intone an elegy to a pass- ing way of life at the same time as it salutes the onset of a new. But don't let that dis- suade you from seeing it: in whatever light you care to view it, it is an engaging film.
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