Viva Villa! is a 1934 film starring Wallace Beery as Pancho Villa that was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and was written by Ben Hecht, adapted from a biography by Edgecumb Pinchon and Odo B. Stade. The film was directed by Jack Conway. There was special, uncredited help with the script by Howard Hawks, James Kevin McGuinness, and Howard Emmett Rogers. Hawks and William A. Wellman also contributed uncredited directing help.
The movie is a fictionalized biography of Pancho Villa starring Beery, Leo Carrillo, and Fay Wray. Lee Tracy was originally cast in a supporting role but was fired after drunkenly urinating off a balcony onto the Mexican crowd below. Tracy's career never fully recovered from this incident, although he did make other films, most notably Gore Vidal's The Best Man thirty years later.
Viva Villa! partially inspired the creation of Elia Kazan's 1952 film Viva Zapata!, written by John Steinbeck and starring Marlon Brando.
Beery had played Villa once before, in a supporting role, in a 1917 film starring Irene Castle called Patria.
Cast
Wallace Beery ... Pancho Villa
Leo Carrillo ... Sierra
Fay Wray ... Teresa
Donald Cook ... Don Felipe de Castillo
Stuart Erwin ... Jonny Sykes
Henry B. Walthall ... Francisco Madero
Joseph Schildkraut ... Gen. Pascal
Katherine DeMille ... Rosita Morales (as Katherine de Mille)
George E. Stone ... Emilio Chavito
Phillip Cooper ... Pancho Villa as a boy
David Durand ... Bugle boy
Frank Puglia ... Pancho Villa's father
Ralph Bushman ... Wallace Calloway (reporter) (as Francis X. Bushman Jr.)
Adrian Rosley ... Alphonso Mendoza
Henry Armetta ... Alfredo Mendosa
"Viva Villa!"
"Viva Villa!" is a shout meant to praise Pancho Villa in times of injustice, much like "Viva Zapata!"
See also
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Films directed by Howard Hawks |
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| 1930s |
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| 1940s |
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| 1950s |
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