Product Details

• Actors: Paul Muni, Bette Davis, Brian Aherne, Claude Rains, John Garfield
• Directors: William Dieterle
• Writers: Bertita Harding, Franz Werfel, John Huston, Wolfgang Reinhardt, Ćneas MacKenzie
• Producers: Hal B. Wallis, Henry Blanke
• Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, NTSC
• Language: English, Spanish
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: MGM/UA Home Video
• VHS Release Date: September 1, 1998
• Run Time: 125 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6302010985
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #133,691 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A HOLLYWOOD STYLE MEXICAN REVOLUTION..., January 14, 2002

By 

Lawyeraau (Balmoral Castle) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Juarez [VHS] (VHS Tape)

This 1939 film is an ambitious historical drama that, while based on history, takes creative license in dramatizing the story of Benito Juarez, the legendary Mexican freedom fighter who liberated the Mexican people from the French Empire and the puppet rule of the Habsburgs. Studded with an all star cast, it is an entertaining venture, though somewhat historically inaccurate.

Paul Muni in the role of the legendary Juarez eerily resembles the humble Mexican peasant of Indian stock who liberated the Mexican people from their foreign oppressors. Briane Aherne is almost saintly in the role of the doomed Maximilian Von Habsburg, who, having become head of the puppet government in a move engineered by the despotic Emporor of France, Louis Napoleon III (Claude Rains), believes that he and Juarez are not so far apart in their ideology, a belief with which Juarez begged to differ.

Bette Davis, surprisingly enough, looks positively beautiful as Maximilian's beloved wife, the tragic Carlotta, and does a wonderful job with this supporting role, understated until she becomes unbalanced towards the end, when the political perfidy of which she and her husband were victims becomes unbearable for her, causing her to go over the brink into madness.

Donald Crisp, Gilbert Roland, John Garfield, and Gale Sondergaard round out this excellent cast. The film is an intriguing blend of political propaganda, political correctness (for the time), and creative license. Still, it manages to capture the flavor of a Mexico desperate for independence from its European oppressors, the French and the Spanish Grandees and landowners, who looked down upon the predominantly Indian peons that constituted the majority of the Mexican people. All in all, it is a film well worth watching and one that will be enjoyed by all those who love classic, vintage films.

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Typically bizarre Hollywood history, April 26, 2002

By 

Jay Dickson (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Juarez [VHS] (VHS Tape)

This movie really should have been called CARLOTTA AND MAXIMILIAN, because the doomy erstwhile emperor and empress get far more screentime than Juarez in this insane Hollywood concoction. Puppet emperors always make for interesting film stories (as in Bertolucci's THE LAST EMPEROR), but the Manichaean demands of classic Hollywood made Warner Brothers realize that no matter how much screen time they'd give to Bette Davis and Brian Aherne as the Hapsburg couple they could never sell them as heroes. So, they recruited Paul Muni, the studio's favorite portrayer of noble biopic subjects, as the glum President Beinto Juarez, and two of Hollwyood's most recognizable essayers of villainous roles, Claude Rains and Gale Sondergaard, to wear the black hats as Napoleon III and his empress Eugenie (Sondergaard is so archly evil she may as well be preparing to play the Spider Woman).

Muni doesn't make much of an impression plodding around impassively as Juarez, and with his stony facial expression the screenwriters and director clearly decided they'd better do **something** to remind the audience he was playing the good guy. So, Muni is always photographed in front of pictures of Abraham Lincoln (to remind viewers he's the republican). Aherne and Davis fare much better as the tragic Hapsburgs, and the film does have one great scene when Davis has to go to France to plead Naopeon and Eugenie for support and goes mad before their very eyes. Though you'd never guess it from the film's general free-and-easy approach to history, this scene actually happened in real life, and the dialogue in the scene pretty much follows the historical record--and there's a great visual touch when Davis, convinced the Bonapartes are trying to poison her, runs out of into the Tuileries gardens as if possessed into the night, her beautiful silver silk traveling dress billowing like a cloud around her as she shrinks into the blackness of the night (and her madness). But this, and the film's lovely use of "La Paloma" as a recurrent musical theme, are hardly enough to sustain you through the longeurs of Muni stalking around like a zombie.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Benito Who? ...árez, August 13, 2000

By 

Paco Calderón (Mexico City, Mexico) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Juarez [VHS] (VHS Tape)

This movie was made at the outset of WWII, under Roosevelt's "good neighbor" policy, aimed at winning Latin America's hearts and minds against the rising threat of fascism. There was strong sympathy at the time throughout the region for the Axis powers, specially for Franco, who was percieved by many as waging war against godless, priest-murdering communism. Roosevelt would have none of that.

What better story, then, than that of Benito Juárez, the destitute-born president who saved democracy fighting against French foreign rule from autocrat Louis Napoleon III's interventing troops and puppet regime in mid XIX century Mexico. A great politically-correct history lesson, tailor-made for the current menacing times. However, Hollywood had serious second thoughts about this film being made, most of them regarding Juárez himself.

Screenwriter Aeneas Mackenzie thought the movie wouldn't sell because Juárez's indian features resembled "a pithecantropus" while Maximilian and Carlotta were young, white and handsome. American audiences would have difficulty seeing the doomed couple as "bad guys", much less rooting for such an ugly hero. Not only that, Don Benito was rabidly anticlerical, a liberal freemason who took on the pope and nationalized all Church properties; Catholics at the box office wouldn't like that either. Warner Bros then hired a young John Huston to ammend the script: Juárez would carry a portrait of Lincoln at all times to make him more amiable, the Church would be written off, replaced by some imaginary "landowners", and Louis Napoleon's evilness would be emphasized by dark, contrasted, horror-movie-like lighting.

Even so the movie didn't do well, neither in the States nor in Mexico. There it was premiered in a gala screening at the Bellas Artes Palace, a rare honor for any film even today. The sequence where the American ambassador warns Napoleon against defying the Monroe Doctrine was suppressed altogether, and the finale, where Juárez apologizes to Maximilian at his coffin, drew loud protests from the audience. Mexican critics tore the film apart in their reviews, calling it a Hollywood sugarcoated version of Mexican history (it is) and an affront to national pride (it is not). In that sense, the movie's best intentions clearly backfired.

But is the movie that bad? Well, yes and no: it's your average Hollywood period romance. Wonderful sets and costumes but lots of preachy dialogue and not much historical truth. Then again, not many pictures at the time cared about those things. Bette Davis does an interesting Carlotta, Muni is a deadpan bore, and Claude Rains -as usual- steals the show (as Napoleon III). Oddly enough, the film had an influence on another quite different movie. Director Terence Young liked William Dieterle's filmmaking so much, he borrowed for 'Dr. No' the scene where Juárez is shown for the first time: one just sees his back while he speaks, and when someone asks his name, he turns around and says: "Juárez", giving him an air of mystery and awe. Young introduced his movie's main character the same way: you only see his hands playing cards at the casino table, then a gorgeous girl asks his name, the camera goes up and... voila!, a classic is born: "Bond, James Bond". Thank Juárez, Benito Juárez, for that one.

Benito Who?