The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez

Robert Young's Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1981 - 1983) is a film that is much better than it looks.  In fact, the picture is a masterpiece but, because of its rebarbative Modernist structure, the movie is very hard to appreciate.  The greatest films are both beautiful and profound.  The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez is profound but, intentionally, eschews beauty  -- it's Brechtian and invites thought, but never draws you into an uncritical identification with its characters or with its ostensible genre, the chase Western.  I misunderstood most of the film on first viewing -- that's another difficulty with the movie:  the revelation of a plot point that motivates much of the movie is withheld until the film's last twenty minutes.  With that "reveal" in mind, the viewer really needs to see the movie a second time.  This was impossible in theaters and, so, the movie failed in that venue.  It has taken re-issue of the film by Criterion for viewers to fully appreciate the complex narrative strategy and symbolism that the picture only gradually, and, as it were under duress, reveals.

In simplest analysis, the film's story can be told in a few words:  A Mexican-American, Cortez, shoots a sheriff and is pursued by armies of Texas Rangers; the lone horseman is finally captured and put on trial for murder -- he is convicted, but, later, the conviction is reversed and there are more trials, many years of imprisonment, and, then, Cortez is pardoned.  Two-thirds of the film is devoted to the chase; the last third of the film reveals motivations and argues the facts in the trial scenes. (The structure, as has been often noted, is a bit like The Man who shot Liberty Valence -- a climactic trial reveals what the rest of the film means.)  The theme of the movie is revealed late in the film.  All of the bloody mayhem shown by the film is the result of the mistranslation of a single Spanish word -- therefore, the film is about communication and misunderstanding.  In an opening sequence, we see Gregorio Cortez on horseback riding through the scrub with a posse chasing him -- the sequence is shot perversely in the darkness:  the sun isn't just setting, but it has already set and the edges of the images are rimmed in red with tomato-colored flares on the lenses.  The scene looks strange and isn't even remotely exciting because we can barely see what is happening.  But this is thematic -- the movie is metaphorically about the darkness of misunderstanding and, so, the images of people chasing each other in the night, that is, unable to see one another clearly, is crucial to the movie's symbolism.  The problem is that we don't know this until we have seen the whole film.  Another sequence will suffice to illustrate the interpretive problems the movie presents:  a Texas Ranger, the man leading the hunt, is talking on a primitive telephone (the film is set in 1901 in West Texas).  The scene goes on and on with the Ranger shouting into the phone and unable to make himself understood.  The viewer gets irritated -- what is the point of a scene illustrating the deficiencies of turn-of-the-20th century telephones?  But, later, we learn that the whole film turns on a miscommunication -- the old "telephone" game played between languages.  With one startling exception, the movie withholds from the viewer the standard pleasures of a Western -- there seem to be too many close-ups and the camera is often placed in a position that is uncommunicative.  The gunfights are chaotic affairs with people swinging their guns as they shoot like clubs, seemingly forgetting that the weapon is a firearm, and everyone is killed at close-range in brawls that don't make any sense.  The film shows little sense of topography -- although with one great exception.  When Cortez is trapped in a box canyon, he simply escapes off-screen -- we don't know how he accomplishes this act:  this sort of derring-do is not what interests the film-maker and, so, he blithely avoids staging what would be an exciting sequence in most movies.  As a Spanish-speaking peasant, Cortez is invisible unless a posse is chasing him -- he waters his horse at a Hill Country pond while other cowboys simply ignore him.  In one surprising scene, Cortez goes into a café and eats lunch while the place is crowded with Texas Rangers who have just been chasing him -- they don't know what he looks like and Mexicans literally "can't be seen" unless they are criminals.  There is a annoyingly long sequence in which Cortez eats with a cowhand who has been riding fences for two months.  The Anglo cow-hand is desperately lonely and talks to Cortez for what purports to be hours, knowing full well that Cortez has no idea what he is saying -- this is also thematic, although the viewer doesn't know it when the scene actually plays.  In the chase scenes, the pursuing posse usually seem so close to Cortez that it is unimaginable that they would not catch him -- the viewer first curses the director ("this man doesn't even know how to stage a horse chase") but, then, grasps, at last, that the horse chases aren't the point of the movie:  they are just punctuation.  And, as I will note below, when he wants a horse chase to excite the viewer, Young stages one of the greatest episodes of this kind in the history of the Western.  The trial scenes are under-dramatized, basically forums for the kind of florid oratory that lawyers favored 120 years ago -- they are realistic but not exciting or suspenseful.  Young's point is that Cortez story is instantly converted into something other than the bare facts -- it becomes a springboard for Ciceronian rhetoric in the court room, it sells newspaper as journalism, and, most importantly, it becomes the basis of a border ballad, a corrido that is still sung today and that we see performed in a makeshift theater where Mexicans are raising money for Cortez' defense.  Facts are never just the facts -- they are politicized, sensationalized, and, ultimately, turned into mythology. 

In the supplemental material on the disc, Edward James Olmos, the Chicano star who was instrumental in getting this picture produced, repeatedly says that the movie is the movie was stated to be "the most authentic historical picture ever produced" by the American Historical Society.  But every narrative strategy in the film cuts against this perception -- in fact, the film feels hyper-modern, cubist, a bit like Rossellini's late didactic films or Antonioni's Blow Up.  Lens flares are ubiquitous, always reminding the viewer that there is a camera between us and what the film shows.  The movie has a complicated structure of flashbacks, sometimes, the same scene shown from two different perspectives, and the narrative is not chronological but choppy with cuts back and forth between different time-frames.  The editing is confusing -- this seems to me to be an unintentional defect and, on first watching the film, my main note to myself was that I couldn't understand the obstructive nature of the editing.  The soundtrack is Vangelis-style techno-pop that seems jarring, particularly since the movie is ostensibly based on a folk ballad.  Camera set-ups are intentionally uncommunicative.  Often the film looks ugly -- it was shot on 16 mm in natural light and scenes are either too dark or too bright.  (The movie was made for what we would call PBS today, shown 17 times on TV, and, then, basically shelved after it failed with test audiences at the box office; the picture was also financed by Redford's Sundance Institute, one of the first movies to be sponsored by that organization, and, paid for, in part, as well, by La Raza.  One of the places where the film was shot was Chama, New Mexico, the site of a Gregorio Cortez-style manhunt that almost erupted into Civil War between the Anglos and the Latinos in the late sixties -- that manhunt also arose from the shooting of a sheriff and his deputy at a courthouse.  It's not clear to me what happened when scenes were shot at Chama, only a decade after the big gunfights in that area -- whatever occurred Olmos and the others choose not to talk about this.)  A commitment to shooting on actual locations requires the filmmakers to make perverse choices in the jail and trial scenes -- it's too dark in many of these shots and the space makes no sense:  there seems to be a gallows in the jail (and there was in fact)  but the camera angles don't ever really show you the environment presumably because it was too tight to put a camera anywhere to survey the scene.  Most radically, the Spanish in the movie is not translated -- we don't see an interpreter until the film is almost over.  Young doesn't give us any subtitles and, so, when the characters speak in Spanish we can only guess what they are saying -- again, this is powerfully thematic since the film's theme is miscommunication across the language barrier.  But one can imagine the confusion that the film caused when it was first shown -- it seems that the first and most enthusiastic audiences to embrace the film were bilingual Chicanos who saw the movie in theaters at free screenings hosted by La Raza when the picture was first completed.)  In another riff on the theme of miscommunication, Young stages a scene with the victorious Texas Rangers drinking toasts to their capture of Cortez -- he uses Altman style overlapping dialogue, so densely mixed that we can't really hear what any of the men are saying -- it's just a mumble of syllables, a modernist device for making even English, the majority audience's home tongue, seem incomprehensible.  Some parts of the movie just don't make sense:  we see Cortez gazing down at the Rio Grande and know that he is within a few hundred yards of escaping into Mexico.  But in the next scene he is huddled in tiny shack at the bottom of a deep hollow and surrounded by Texas Rangers -- he is captured without a shot being fired, a deliberate and audience-unfriendly anti-climax.  (For my taste, Olmos is too pathetic in some scenes --  he has big Bill Keane eyes and looks like a wounded bird and he is always kissing or hugging his horse in an endearing way:  these latter gestures, however, are also realistic; everyone agrees that Cortez is a consummate horseman and, in fact, his skill with these animals is what keeps him ahead of the armies of Texas Rangers chasing him.)

In short, the film's apparent deficiencies, except, I think, the bad editing, are all thematic.  In one scene, a herd of Texas Rangers chases Cortez to a high ridge.  From atop the ridge, Cortez can see a train steaming forward and the entire shimmering plain blocked by skirmish lines of riders charging uphill toward him.  Cortez drives his horse down the steep hill, riding right at the approaching horsemen -- then, he turns sharply and rides along the front of their approaching column while the air puffs and smokes with pistol and rifle shots.  The men on the train start shooting at Cortez and his galloping horse as well.  Cortez outruns the train locomotive in a welter of Soviet-style montage (the horse's legs rhythmically intercut with the train engineers shoveling coal into the locomotive's fiery maw) and, then, crossing the tracks, speeds under a high railroad trestle, galloping through the shadows cast by the engine and its cars as  the train crosses the bridge.  This is one of the most thrilling and brilliantly choreographed action sequences ever filmed and shows what Young could do if action for action's sake interested him.