I saw the film Viva Max! probably in late 1969 or early 1970, in one of Denton, Texas’ two movie theaters. It’s a comedy about a Mexican army officer who leads his troops across the U.S. Border to San Antonio, in order to reclaim the Alamo for Mexico. My 10-year-old-self thought it was pretty funny. It also had a catchy march/mariachi theme song which became a staple of middle-school marching bands.
In later years I occasionally caught a glimpse of Viva Max! in cycling through late-night TV channels, and it started to seem a little lame. More recently, I’ve wanted to see it again, but it’s kind of hard to find. It doesn’t show up on Netflix’s DVD service, or on Amazon Prime, for example. It doesn’t make the Turner Classic Movie rotation. I have a suspicion as to why: the movie is transparently, blatantly racist.
The lead character is played by Peter Ustinov in brownface as the bumbling title officer, doing a cheesy “Mexican” accent. Ustinov was a British actor of (according to Wikipedia) Russian, Polish, Jewish, Ethiopian, Italian, French, and German descent. What he was not in any way was Mexican. His character’s second in command, Sergeant Valdez, is played by John Astin, of TV’s Addams Family fame. If there were any actual Hispanic members of the cast, I can’t find them.
Today such a project would not get past the concept pitch. But there’s no evidence of hackles or even eyebrows being raised back then. (The closest thing I can find to indignation is a comment in Vincent Canby’s dismissive review in the New York Times. Canby stated that Ustinov’s “busy performance” included “a Mexican accent that would probably strike even Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez as too much.”) I imagine that any actual Mexican viewers would have found the film deeply offensive, but of course it wasn’t made with a Hispanic audience in mind. What was different then, than now?
Viva Max! wasn’t a product of right-wing xenophobic hate-mongers. It came out of the pseudo-progressive Hollywood establishment. The movie sets up and parodies the dumb Texas redneck stereotype (played to perfection by Jonathan Winters as a frustrated shopkeeper-National Guard officer) and makes fun of anti-Communist paranoia. Ustinov’s character isn’t portrayed with the hateful, scary, Donald Trump sort of anti-immigrant racism, but rather with the much more comfortable patronizing, condescending sort of racism. He’s a sympathetic character, and it’s easy to imagine that his creators thought they were humanizing the Mexican “other.” The screenplay was written by none other than a young Jim Lehrer (and adapted from his own book), later of PBS MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour fame. Hardly an avatar of knee-jerk xenophobia. Ustinov himself advocated a planet governed (not just mediated) by the United Nations.
I think about Viva Max! when I think about anti-“woke” hysteria today. I am certain that any objections to the film for its demeaning portrayal of Mexicans would have caused the same rolled eyebrows and shaking heads that, say, gender-neutral pronouns do today. I don’t particularly like gender-neutral pronouns, and I am not convinced that they are important. But I don’t think the concept is stupid, and I wonder how thinking people will look back on this era in fifty years. Maybe they’ll say, “Can you believe that back then, people were referred to by different terms, depending on whether they had a penis or a uterus?” I certainly hope that suppression of the role of slavery and Jim Crow in public education will be accepted as monstrous. And I hope that banning of drag shows will look as ridiculous as the censoring of Elvis Presley’s hip gyrations were in his time.
But who knows? We’ve been taking big backward steps these days with respect to women’s rights and education among other things. “Woke,” which to me means a healthy, honest examination of one’s own feelings towards other human beings, is being set up as Average Joe’s bogeyman. The idea that black people may be treated worse than white people in this country is being demonized as “critical race theory.” So maybe Viva Max! and its ilk will enjoy a comeback—and not in any ironic, cult-film kind of way.
The Garden of Eaton 