I cannot recall a single film that jumped into the action so quickly! Only seconds after the opening titles finish, you see a brutish man slapping around a woman. Pedro (Pedro Infante) confronts the guy, but instead of stopping, this jerk-face announces that he's the Attorney General's son and can do whatever he wants! Then, he draws a gun on Pedro and tries to kill him. Pedro slugs him and the nasty guy strikes his head on the pavement and dies*! Talk about an exciting and fast-paced opening!
What follows are a long series of scenes that illustrate how corrupt the government and landowners are. In order to try to catch Pedro (who is assumed guilty), they begin brutally suppressing the native peoples. However, these people won't talk--and keep hiding Pedro's whereabouts. But Pedro is appalled and confronts his godfather--a man who is supporting all this madness! He slaps the old guy around and takes his ill-gotten gain--vowing to redistribute it to the poor. What follows is a Robin Hood-like campaign to redistribute the wealth of the countryside back to the poor. What follows is an enjoyable story about race and class prejudices--as the poor Indian girl, Maria, is in love with Pedro--a man descended from the rich, white landlords.
So if I enjoyed this, why do I only give it a 6? Well, there are some problems with it--one of which is not the fault of the filmmakers. There is way too much music, as like any Pedro Infante film there is this need to inject unnecessary songs--thus weakening the plot. A few scenes are also awkward and should have been better (a couple examples are listed below). The other problem, one not caused by the filmmakers, is that the captioning is very poor--with lots of misinterpretations that just sound awkward, such as 'put fire on our homes' (they mean 'set our homes on fire'), 'I was stolen' ('I was robbed') and 'Stop being watching' ('stop watching me'). Sometimes I really had no idea what they were talking about-- as they referred to the rich, ruling class as 'the bald ones'?!
*This opening fight is amazingly lame and was not choreographed well. See it and you'll see what I mean. This same low quality in direction can be seen at about 52 minutes into the film where two rich guys try to capture Pedro.
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