The Mark of Zorro Read online

  The best of the foreign films is Zorro, starring Alain Delon (1974), which takes place in South America, in a country called Nueva Aragona, where most of the peasants are Africans rather than Mexican or Indian. The aristocrats wear eighteenth-century costumes and live in elaborate palaces. When the newly appointed governor is murdered in Barcelona, he asks Don Diego to impersonate him. Arriving in Nueva Aragona with Bernardo, Diego finds that Colonel Huerta (Stanley Baker) has established martial law. As governor, Diego pretends to be an intimidated dandy but appears as Zorro when, as in the original novel, a priest is being flogged for allegedly selling rotten hides. In this and subsequent episodes, Zorro does spectacular stunt work and makes fools of the soldiers with a series of comic booby traps. The heroine is the aristocratic Hortensia Pulido, who dresses in peasant clothing and tries to rouse the people against extortion and exploitation. When Colonel Huerta tries to make violent love to her, Zorro makes him get on his knees and beg her pardon, as he did to Captain Ramón in the novel. At the end, after Zorro has released slaves from a mine, the people start to revolt, and the soldiers will no longer obey Colonel Huerta, Zorro fights a duel with him that is one of the longest and most spectacular on film; at the climax, Zorro says, “Let it be the moment of truth,” pulls off his mask, and gives Huerta a fatal thrust. Though the script is only fair, Zorro has a good production, lively action, an excellent cast, and a dashing performance by Delon.

  In the same year, an ABC movie of the week featured a television version in color of The Mark of Zorro, using the script of the 1940 film, slightly condensed, and Alfred Newman’s score. Frank Langella was acceptable as the fop but not very dashing as the masked adventurer, and Ricardo Montalban lacked Basil Rathbone’s sneering menace as Captain Pasquale. The swordplay was tame.

  Following the pornographic The Erotic Adventures of Zorro (1972), George Hamilton starred in the amusing parody Zorro, the Gay Blade (1980) in which the dual aspects of Don Diego Vega are split between two sons, Diego, who inherits the mantle of Zorro, and his twin brother, who is flamboyantly gay and has renamed himself Bunny Wiggles-worth. The first swashes, the other swishes, flouncing about in a fashion show of Zorro costumes in a variety of colors, including shocking pink, while his brother is recovering from a wound.

  The next year Zorro appeared in an animated thirteen-episode Saturday morning TV series by Filmation. Then in 1983, Disney produced five episodes of Zorro and Son, a slapstick sitcom with Henry Darrow as the first Hispanic actor to play Zorro in an American film; Paul Regina played his son. Darrow had been the voice of Zorro in the Filmation animated series.

  In 1990 Zorro made a major comeback with the New World Zorro, a four-year-long television series of eighty-eight half-hour episodes, filmed in Spain and starring Duncan Regehr, a Canadian actor who had done Shakespeare at Stratford, Ontario, and had also played Errol Flynn on television. Like Disney’s Zorro, his Don Diego was not a fop but used philosophy and writing poetry as a cover. Far from being timorous, he spoke out boldly against tyranny and was imprisoned for doing so. After the first season, Henry Darrow took over as Alejandro de la Vega. Disney’s lovable fat Sergeant Garcia now became Sergeant Mendoza (James Victor), and the deaf mute Bernardo was changed to a handsome teenager, Felipe (Juan Diego Botto), whom Don Diego eventually adopted. Don Diego maintained a long-running but not very passionate romance with Victoria Escalante (Patrice Martinez), the proprietress of a taverna. The episodes had Zorro fighting such timeless issues as environmental degradation, bigotry, superstition, and of course, varieties of oppression.

  The final four episodes were an ongoing story that was turned into a particularly good film called Zorro: Conspiracy of Blood. It opens in 1793 in Spain, where a childless midwife drugs Señora de la Vega so that she does not know she has delivered twins. The midwife steals the older of the two and raises him as her own son, while the other son is sent to his father in California. In 1824, the elder son, called Risendo, arrives in Los Angeles as the emissary of the King of Spain. (Never mind that Mexico became independent of Spain in 1821.) The emissary uses the fact that Spain is at war with France to establish martial law that will let him do anything he wishes, and to impose a huge war tax. To instill fear, he sentences the alcalde to be torn apart by horses for supposed incompetence, but Sergeant Mendoza refuses to carry out the order. Zorro appears, cuts the ropes, and rescues the alcalde. The emissary then orders the alcalde and Sergeant Mendoza to capture Zorro within three days or face death. Indoctrinated by his mother to hate and destroy the de la Vegas, Risendo uses Machiavellian methods to turn the townspeople against them and to attempt to turn father against son. As played with relish by James Horan, he is arguably the most complex and hateful villain in all the Zorro films, “a walking pestilence,” as Don Alejandro calls him. After much plotting and lots of action, he gets his just deserts and justice is restored.

  Telecast on the Family cable network, New World Zorro was not as universally available as the Disney series, but it was shown in thirty-five countries around the world.47 Alma Burnette, teacher in a Kentucky inner-city school, used Zorro to show her students courage, compassion, fighting for ideals, and made available a Zorro in the Classroom guide that reached some 140,000 students and caused the National Education Association to recommend New World Zorro.48

  In 1998, TriStar released the most epic Hollywood Zorro and one of the best—The Mask of Zorro. It begins in 1821, when a middle-aged Zorro (Anthony Hopkins) performs what he thinks will be his last heroic feat, rescuing from a firing squad three men that he does not know the departing Spanish governor, Don Raphael Montero (Stuart Wilson), is using for bait. Aided by two street urchins, Joaquin and Alejandro Murrieta, to whom he gives a medallion, Zorro escapes, but Montero and his troops follow and surprise him with his wife and infant daughter, kill the wife, and throw Zorro into a dungeon, where he festers for twenty years while his daughter Elena (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is being raised in Spain as Montero’s daughter.

  In 1841, Montero returns, plotting to buy California from General Santa Anna and become its ruler. When he visits the dungeon to see if Zorro is still alive, Zorro manages to escape and seeks revenge. Also burning for revenge is Alejandro Murrieta, brother of the bandit Joaquin Murrieta, killed by Montero’s ally, an American army officer, Captain Love (Matt Letscher), who keeps Joaquin’s head preserved in a jar of whiskey. Finding Alejandro with the medallion he had given the brothers who helped him, Zorro decides to turn him into a younger Zorro to help him defeat Montero. There is much humor as Hopkins, playing a sort of Zorro emeritus, transforms the bearded, uncouth, and ignorant bandit into a clean-shaven, polished gentleman as well as an accomplished swordsman. At the same time, Alejandro falls in love with Elena, in a series of erotically charged encounters, including a swordfight with her in a stable and a dance at the palace, where he is masquerading as an emissary from Spain while the older Zorro pretends to be his servant Bernardo. Eventually, she learns who her real father is. Originally, Stephen Spielberg, a lifelong Zorro fan, planned to direct, but he ended up as a producer, and the film was directed with brio by Martin Campbell. This time, the characterizations are richer and more complex than in earlier Zorro movies; at the same time, there are many acrobatic sequences, spectacular stunts, and lots of excellent swordplay as the two Zorros foil the plot of Montero and Love to take over California.

  There are several anachronisms: though his supposed head really was exhibited in a jar, Joaquin Murrieta was killed not in 1841 but in 1853; and Santa Anna is supposedly willing to consider selling California because he needs money to fight the United States, but the Mexican War did not begin until 1846. These caveats are trifling in the face of the rousing adventure of love and honor and the romatic sweep of the drama.

  Despite Zorro’s worldwide popularity as a Mexican hero, not everyone is a fan. Playwright Luis Valdez recalled seeing the Fairbanks 1920 film when he was “an eight-year-old migrant Chicano kid” and wondering “who is this guy who is supposed to be me?�
��49 Years later, as playwright and filmmaker, he reflected on the films in an era of “Mexican immigrant-bashing” in California and the problems of making a politically correct Zorro for the 1990s.50 Valdez himself in Bandido! examined the contrast between the historical Tiburcio Vasquez and the exploitation of his career in stage melodramas.51 In the process Valdez satirizes the stereotype, stating in his preface to Bandido! that “the history of the Old West is such a blend of fiction, fact, conjecture, and sheer poppycock that it amounts to a flawed American mythology under constant revision.”52

  Certainly the villains in the Zorro films are a series of evil Spanish or Mexican governors, alcaldes, and commandantes. In the historical record, there were enough villainous officials from both nations to make this part of the legend credible. In the majority of the films there is virtually no visible middle class; there are the military, friars, caballeros, and peons ; whether Indian or Mexican or both, the latter are particularly stereotyped. In the films, most aristocrats speak with impeccable Anglo accents, while the lower classes use Spanish accents. A related issue is the claim that Zorro was not played by a Hispanic actor until Henry Darrow in Zorro and Son (1983) and Antonio Banderas in The Mask of Zorro (1998). Ironically, Banderas, a Spaniard, with all the myth’s associations of the proud and ancient lineage of Spain, portrays a brother of the infamous Murrieta, a commoner who must learn swordsmanship and aristocratic manners from the aging Zorro, played by the Welsh Anthony Hopkins. The casting of Zorro involves several issues, from the current disputes surrounding immigration policy to the underrepresentation of Latinos in film, both in front of and behind the camera, and the fact that they have been too often portrayed as stereotypes: the Latin lover, the señorita, the spitfire, the dueña, and the buffoon, who is usually a fat sidekick or sergeant, a Sancho Panza to Zorro’s Don Quixote. Despite such caveats, Zorro has been enormously popular in Latin and South America, and hordes of admirers mobbed Guy Williams when he visited Argentina.

  By the 1990s, Zorro mania became epidemic. Zorro toys, games, puppets, collectible cards, and memorabilia proliferated all over the world. Internationally, dozens of commercials had products endorsed by Zorro. Spinoff books began to appear. Jim Luceno novelized The Mask of Zorro for adults, and Frank Lauria did so for children. Sandra R. Curtis, vice president of Zorro Productions, wrote seven Zorro novels for young readers that were published in eight European countries.53 Tor Books and Pocket Books each brought out a series of new Zorro novels.54

  Comic book versions of Zorro had been published in France since 1939, and others appeared in Italy and the Netherlands.55 In 1993, Topps Comics began a series written by Don McGregor and illustrated by various artists, who said that they loved drawing Zorro because of the acrobatics the character performed and the chiaroscuro of the nocturnal scenes. The opening episode ran parallel stories of Zorro and Dracula and then brought them into deadly conflict climaxed by a combat in Notre Dame cathedral, at the end of which Napoleon Bonaparte resurrects the defeated Dracula. There are also Zorro graphic novels.

  Throughout the summer of 1994, Los Angeles’ Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum mounted an extensive exhibit called The Mask of Zorro: Mexican-Americans in Popular Media, accompanied by a booklet of that title. Two years later, the Arts and Entertainment network telecast an hour-long Zorro on its biography series. The rest of the decade saw another animated TV series, a Zorro play for children and another for adults, and two Zorro musicals—one in Mexico City, another in London—and a BBC radio series based on the original novel, all of them well received both by critics and audiences.56 According to Isabel Allende, sixty-four percent of people in China know about Zorro, as do ninety-seven percent of those in Germany.57 Dozens of Japanese samurai films feature Zatoichi, a blind swordsman who slashes Zs on his enemies. A confused student wrote that Zoroastrianism is a religion that worships Zorro. On the Internet, looking for Zorro on any search engine will bring up Web sites within Web sites within Web sites. Were he alive today, McCulley might repeat the words of Lew Wallace after Ben-Hur became a hit play around the world: “My God! Did I set all this in motion?”

  Zorro, the Gay Blade, is dedicated to Rouben Mamoulian and the other filmmakers, “Whose past gives us our future.” Film has given us a contemporary mythology, a constantly changing and evolving frame of reference. Shrek 2, on the face of it light-years from Zorro, has Antonio Banderas as the voice of Puss in Boots, a dual-identity cat (harmless, adorable kitten and demonic swordsman) with a Spanish accent. Announcing himself with a P slashed on a tree with the three traditional strokes, he joins Shrek and Donkey on their quest, as a point of honor: Shrek has saved his life. Obviously, the entire audience is expected to—and does—get the allusion. Zorro, in unexpected guises, rides again tonight.

  NOTES

  1 Respectable authors included Louisa May Alcott, who “responded to the specific request from a Boston publisher of pulp fiction, James R. Elliott, for a novel of twenty-four chapters in which each second chapter would be so ‘absorbingly interesting that the reader would be impatient for the next.”’ (Kent Bicknell, ed., “The Genesis of A Long Fatal Love Chase,” in A Long Fatal Love Chase, Louisa May Alcott. New York: Dell Books, 1997, p. 348.) McCulley’s opening chapters follow this advice, quite probably standard for pulp fiction.

  2 Isabel Allende, telephone interview by authors, August 16, 2004.

  3 Imagine The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, and Elmer Gantry with the titles their authors originally contemplated for them-Trimalchio in West Egg, L’Affaire Lettuceville, and Myron Mellish.

  4 Johnston McCulley, The Sword of Zorro (New York: L Harper Allen, 1928), p. 10.

  5 Bob Kane and Tom Andrae, Batman and Me, An Autobiography (Forestville, Calif.: Eclipse Books, 1989), pp. 1, 37-38.

  6 Sandra Curtis, Zorro Unmasked (New York: Hyperion, 1998), p. 22.

  7 McCulley, The Sword of Zorro, p. 37.

  8 See Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769-1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press 1995), pp. 29-32. To further confuse the concept of “pure” blood, as Hass explains, “White” lineage could be purchased from the crown with gold or other goods through a decree called gracias al sacar (thanks to be taken out, removed, or freed).

  9 Johnson McCulley, “Zorro Draws His Blade,” in Zorro: The Masters Edition, vol. 1, (Madison, Wisconsin: Pulp Adventures, Inc), p.100.

  10 Johnston McCulley, The Caballero (New York: Samuel Curl, Inc., 1947), p. 26.

  11 McCulley, The Sword of Zorro, p. 82.

  12 Ibid., p. 6.

  13 Ibid., p. 92.

  14 McCulley, “Zorro Draws His Blade,” p. 106.

  15 McCulley, The Sword of Zorro, p. 198.

  16 McCulley, The Caballero, p. 9.

  17 Ibid., p. 47.

  18 Peonage could be legally imposed for indebtedness, but in practice the debtors were often illegally pressed into service. The relationship between padron and peons was semifeudal, often paternalistic but also little better than slavery.

  19 McCulley, The Caballero, p. 52.

  20 Ibid., p. 50.

  21 Ibid., p. 206.

  22 Carey McWilliams, North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), pp. 35 ff.

  23 Laurence A. Hill, La Reina: Los Angeles in Three Centuries (Los Angeles: Security-First National Bank of Los Angeles, 1931), p. 29.

  24 McWilliams, North from Mexico, pp. 133-161.

  25 Hill, La Reina p. 27.

  26 McWilliams, North from Mexico, pp. 129-131; Andrew Rolle, California, a History (Wheeling, Illinois: Harlan David-son, 2003), p. 126.

  27 McWilliams, North from Mexico, p. 207.

  28 Carey McWilliams, Southern California Country (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970) p. 82.

  29 Ibid., p. 75.

  30 William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the remarking of the Mexican past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p. 77
.

  31 Ibid., pp. 129-171.

  32 John Steven McGoarty, Mission Memories (Los Angeles: Neuner Corporation, 1929), p. 8.

  33 McWilliams, Southern California Country, pp. 29-37.

  34 Johnston McCulley, Captain Fly-by-Night (New York: G. Howard Watt, 1926), p. 232.

  35 McGoarty, pp. 7-8, 10.

  36 McWilliams, Southern California Country, pp. 29, 35.

  37 James Robert Parish and Don E. Stanke, The Swashbucklers (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1976), p. 184.

  38 Program for The Mission Play, 1924, Special Collections, Honnold/Mudd Library of the Claremont Colleges, Claremont, California.

  39 Isabel Allende, telephone interview by authors, August 16, 2004.

  40 In fact, a film, romanticizing Murrieta as to characterization but quite accurate on the oppressive effect of the Anglos coming down from the North and the gold fields, was called The Robin Hood of El Dorado (1936), directed by William Well-man, with Warner Baxter as Murrieta.

  41 D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, in Edmund Wilson, Ed., The Shock of Recognition (New York: The Modern Library, 1955), p. 965.

  42 For hortus conclusus, see John Dixon Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976, 1989).

  43 Warren A. Beck and David A. Williams, California, A History of the Golden State (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1972), p. 60.

  44 Dennis Belafonte with Alvin H. Marill, The Films of Tyrone Power (Secaucus, N.J.: The Citadel Press, 1979), p. 111.

  45 Bill Yenne, The Legend of Zorro (Greenwich, Conn.: Brompton Books Corporation, 1991), p. 152.

  46 Curtis, Zorro Unmasked, p. 142.

  47 Ibid., p. 181.

  48 Ibid., pp. 182-184.