And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself

(2003)

★ 6.7 IMDb · 103 votes

Genres: Drama, History, War, Western, телевизионный фильм

Year: 2003

Runtime: 112 мин

Country: United States of America

Director: Брюс Бересфорд

Cast: Антонио Бандерас, Эйон Бэйли, Алан Аркин, Джим Бродбент, Matt Day, Майкл Маккин, Кайл Чендлер, Алекса Давалос, Колм Фиори, Anthony Stewart Head

Plot

In 1914, the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa invites studios to shoot his actual battles against Porfírio Diaz army to raise funds for financing guns and ammunition. The Mutual Film Corporation, through producer D.W. Griffith, interests for the proposition and sends the filmmaker Frank Thayer to negotiate a contract with Pancho Villa himself.

Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa (Antonio Banderas) finds himself without adequate funding to finance his war against the military-run government. He also finds himself at odds with the Americans because of the Hearst media empire's press campaign against him. To counter both of these, he sends emissaries to movie producers to convince them to pay to film his progress and the actual battles. Producer D.W. Griffith (Colm Feore) becomes interested and sends Frank Thayer (Eion Bailey) with a film crew to develop film reels. Thayer becomes horrified and fascinated by the bandit. He finds an enigmatic individual that is both ghoulishly brutal and charmingly captivating. The resulting film became the first feature length movie, introducing scores of Americans to the true horrors of war that they had never personally seen. Thayer sold the studios on making the film despite their concerns that no one would sit through a movie longer than 1 hour by convincing them that they could raise the price of movies to ten cents, doubling the going price at that time.