Hey! Break out the sangria! It's
Cesar Romero Night on TCM on Sunday.
Captain From Castile (1947) Sunday, May 20 @8PM (ET)
Tyrone Power has many fine moments in this story that sweeps from the plains and courts of Spain during the Inquisition to the conquest in Mexico.
Cesar Romero really shines in this story along with a great supporting cast that includes
Lee J. Cobb as a likable man who has an impulse control problem when he imbibes--though his character of Juan Garcia has an admirable depth provided by Cobb as he reached the height of his powers as an actor.
Alan Mowbray shows up with only one eye and a tender heart, along with stalwarts John Sutton (as an oily opportunist working for the Inquisition), the dignified
Antonio Moreno as Ty's Papa,
Thomas Gomez as a Padre,
George Zucco,
Marc Lawrence, and superb locations in the country of Mexico, complete with volcanoes steaming in the background!
For me, spying
Cesar Romero in the cast of a movie can be like spotting a welcome friend at a dull party. You know things are going to get a bit more interesting if he is there. Too often only remembered for his enthusiastically gleeful turn as the campy villain, The Joker on the sixties tv show,
Batman,
Cesar Romero had a much longer and interesting career than that one role might indicate. The Manhattan-born Romero was the well-educated child of Cuban parents (there is one still controversial story that claims that he was the natural grandson of Cuban patriot José Martí). Cesar became a ballroom dancer in his twenties and then evolved into a stage actor in the late twenties and early thirties. At one point he became a bit of a Broadway sensation, particularly in Preston Sturges' biggest stage hit, the audacious late jazz age tale,
Strictly Dishonorable.
Appearing in his first movie in 1934, the actor's best parts in films came when he blended his air of exoticism with an underlying good humor in roles such as Khoda Khan in the Shirley Temple film,
Wee Willie Winkie (1937-John Ford), as the compassionate Ram Dass in Temple's
The Little Princess (1939-Walter Lang), and as the head of a family of Italian acrobats in the Greer Garson vehicle,
Julia Misbehaves (1948-Jack Conway). I also like his mock hoodlum in
Tall Dark and Handsome (1941-H. Bruce Humberstone) and his wolfish character in
Orchestra Wives (1942-Archie Mayo). Appearing six times as The Cisco Kid in the early forties,
Romero also carried some obscure but mildly interesting British noirs in the early fifties under the Lippert-Hammer Films banner, (
The Shadow Man, Scotland Yard Inspector).
Most often cast as a secondary leading man, Romero's best remembered films required him to concede the leading lady to another man. How often did he have to vie with John Payne/George Montgomery/Victor Mature for the hand of Sonja Henie/Betty Grable/Alice Faye and lose gracefully by The End? I sure lost count somewhere around
Springtime in the Rockies. Tonight's first movie on TCM,
Captain From Castile (1948), allowed the actor to play the historical figure of Spanish explorer, Hernando Cortez. In the film,
Romero brings to life this complex figure as an adventurer, opportunist and military leader exploring and exploiting the New World of Mexico. At times charming, cunning and ruthless, it is great fun to see Romero having the time of his life at the head of an army, occasionally wresting the attention of the audience away from the central hero played-by the actor's friend,
Tyrone Power. The only thing wrong with Romero's Cortez is that the part deserved a bigger portion of the story.
Above: A bemused Cortez (Cesar Romero) evaluates the person of Jean Peters as Lee J. Cobb and Tyrone Power look on.
The Captain From Castile (1948-Henry King) is the kind of "major motion picture" that must be fun to see in a real theater, even though it is a wee bit long and sometimes lumbers as it marches through Spanish history. The movie was based on a 500+ page novel by Samuel Shellabarger which rode the best seller lists in 1944-1945. Most of that tome could not be translated to the screen because that movie might have been longer than
Greed (1923) and because it might have tread roughly on the toenails of the Vatican and the entire continent of Central and South America. At the end of the day, it remains a gorgeous-looking movie, easy to be swept up in as an example of the studio system's ability to mount a story magnificently just as the same system started to decay. One reason for the film's beauty is undoubtedly the three Directors of Photography laboring to bring forth an epic eyeful on the screen: Charles G. Clarke, Arthur E. Arling, and Joseph LaShelle making this Technicolor trip through the New World meeting the Old.
The movie was helmed by
Henry King, the longtime director who helped to shape
Tyrone Power's stardom, beginning with
Lloyd's of London (1936).
King, who had made movies from 1913 to 1962, had several good flicks to his credit. Some of those are
Tol'able David (1921),
The White Sister (1923),
Stella Dallas (1925), a beautifully done but barely known remake of
Way Down East (1935), as well as later films such as
The Song of Bernadette (1943) and
Twelve O'Clock High (1949) to his credit. Those movies often told solemn but sympathetic stories that highlighted the talent of the actors involved in star-making roles, among them Power, Richard Barthelmess, Ronald Colman, Henry Fonda, and Jennifer Jones. King also made a few movies when the solemnity won out over the storytelling and the portrayals. Maybe
Captain From Castile is one of them, but as a spectacle, it is still pretty compelling.
Additionally, it has an exceptional musical score by Alfred Newman and Vicente Gomez (which was Oscar-nominated), and lots of color and dash, though the leading man seems a bit tired by it all, (this was the postwar stage when a restless Power was trying to break free from his swashbuckling ghetto in his film roles).
The movie begins promisingly, as Spanish lads
Tyrone Power finds himself drawn into a conflict with another man,
John Sutton over a lady (
Barbara Lawrence, as a pretty unlikely Spanish senorita). Soon, he is forced to battle the whole Spanish Inquisition from afar. He's so far away he is doing it from another hemisphere as he helps Cortez bring "civilization" to the Aztecs in Mexico while the conquistadors scoop up any stray gold.
Jean Peters, then a non-actress but stunning beauty, who won a contest concocted by the studio to fill the role of the poor servant girl after Linda Darnell & Jennifer Jones both wriggled free from the part, pines for the love of Power for much of the film. She is pretty darn good, though she got better as her movie career moved along until she chose to become the second consort of Howard Hughes (I always thought that Peters, Debra Paget, and Jeanne Crain, who all worked at 20th Century Fox, might easily have been sisters, but maybe this just tells us more than we need to know about Darryl F. Zanuck's taste in dark-haired women).
One other character I wish that they had allowed to be developed a bit more: the role of
Estela Inda, who played Cortez's Aztec interpreter, another real life personage, reputedly Cortez’s lover and translator, known as "La Malinche" or "Malina."
Cesar Romero as Cortez and Estela Inda as the translator and mistress of Cortez, "Malina" in Captain From Castile.
"La Malinche" is sometimes depicted in Mexican lore as a slave who bore Cortez's child and as a representative figure of a Mexican figure who colluded with the Europeans to betray her own people. This point is so subliminally alluded to in this movie that she is merely inscrutable and mysterious, rather than conflicted, though the actress conveys enough tension and dignity in her scenes that she is often more compelling than the dialogue indicates.
Also on the Romero Menu on TCM tonight:
Above: Milton Berle and Cesar Romero apparently invest in a Velasquez painting of the Spanish Royal Family in A Gentleman at Heart (1942).
A Gentleman at Heart (1942 Sunday, May 20 @10:30PM (ET)
Cesar Romero is starred as a bookie who becomes involved in the art market.
Carole Landis, J. Carrol Naish, Jerome Cowan, Matt McHugh, Elisha Cook, Jr. and
Steven Geray are among the supporting players. Unfortunately
Milton Berle is also listed prominently, though I might be able to ignore his presence. Sounds diverting and it might be fun in a Runyonesque way. I'll probably give it a try. Has anyone else ever seen this movie?