Viva Villa! Explained

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.

Cast

• Wallace Beery as Pancho Villa
• Leo Carrillo as Sierra
• Fay Wray as Teresa
• Donald Cook as Don Felipe de Castillo
• Stuart Erwin as Jonny Sykes
• Henry B. Walthall as Francisco Madero
• Joseph Schildkraut as Gen. Pascal
• Katherine DeMille as Rosita Morales (as Katherine de Mille)
• George E. Stone as Emilio Chavito
• Phillip Cooper as Pancho Villa as a boy
• David Durand as Bugle boy
• Frank Puglia as Pancho Villa's father
• Ralph Bushman as Wallace Calloway (reporter) (as Francis X. Bushman Jr.)
• Adrian Rosley as Alphonso Mendoza
• Henry Armetta as Alfredo Mendosa

Trivia

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.

"Viva Villa!" is a shout meant to praise Pancho Villa in times of injustice, much like "Viva Zapata!"

See also

• Pancho Villa
• Emiliano Zapata
• Wallace Beery