NFR Project: ‘The Revenge of Pancho Villa’
Dir: Felix Padilla
Scr: Felix Padilla
Pho: Felix Padilla
Ed: Felix Padilla
Created 1930-1936
Approx. 60 min.
Here is a fascinating piece of subversive cinema. (Read the National Recording Registry essay by Laura Isabel Serna here.) This film is a biography of the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, but it is not a deliberate biography. No, the man who made this film, Feix Padilla, assembled it out of snatches of other films, creating a patchwork quilt of a movie that paints Villa as a great hero, instead of as the bandit that most of America considered him to be at the time.
Padilla was a touring exhibitor of film, reaching audiences in way out-of-the-way places along the Texas/Mexico border with a traveling cinema. Padilla made his money in small amounts, spending days on the road bringing movies to little towns that didn’t even warrant the building of a movie theater.
During his travels, he collected film sequences that featured Villa or the Mexican revolution, and cut them together in new combinations, bridging big continuity lapses with bilingual title cards. Again and again in the film, Villa defeats the Yankees. I have not seen the film, but it sounds like a big crowd pleaser.
No one knows why Padilla crafted this feature, but it is great to see people create an alternate history.
The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: A Bronx Morning.
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