Cinema: The New Pictures: May 8, 1939

Juárez (Warner Bros.). When Juárez (pronounced "Hwa'-race") had its world premiere in Manhattan's Hollywood Theatre last week, C. I. O.'s John Llewellyn Lewis showed up in a starched shirt. Before the picture started, everyone stood for The Star-Spangled Banner.* Both tributes were fitting, for Juárez is the most political and patriotic canto in the whole Warner cycle of epic biography. Produced at a cost of $2,000,000, over a period of two years, with the services of six Academy Award winners and a cast of 1,188, it is not only the most ambitious production in Warner history but by all odds the most spectacular picture of the year.

The hero of Juárez, who does not appear in it, is James Monroe, fifth President of the U. S. and promulgator of the doctrine that the U. S. wants no foreigners in its back yard. Juárez begins when that doctrine is challenged by cocky little Napoleon III (Claude Rains), who thinks he can set up a Mexican Empire while the U. S. has its hands full with the Civil War. Napoleon's instrument is a foppish but well-intentioned Habsburg archduke, Maximilian (Brian Aherne). Through an engineered plebiscite, Maximilian and his wife Carlota (Bette Davis) are duped into accepting the rule of a remote and turbulent land.

To underline its central character, Juárez makes blond-bearded Maximilian a finer straw man than history allows. Benito Pablo Juárez, the Indian-blooded Constitutional President of Mexico, is a democrat because "when a monarch misrules, he changes the people; when a president misrules, the people change him." In this simple faith Juárez, played with stolid nobility by Paul Muni in a dusty Prince Albert and stovepipe hat, is unmoved by Maximilian's liberal protestations, his break with his selfish landowner backers, his sincere offer to make the President his Secretary of State. And when the U. S. finally frightens Napoleon into abandoning the puppet emperor to his fate, Juárez makes a choice between principle and pity, sends Maximilian before a firing squad.

Essentially two stories (in the picture, as in fact, Juárez and Maximilian never meet), Juárez is unified by its democratic theme, of which it is a picturesque and moving statement. Not a rich pageant of Central American guerrillas and gaiety like Viva Villa!, nor as searching a personal portrait as The Life of Emile Zola, it has moments as gay and as revealing as either. Actor Muni has never been so impressive as he is in outfacing an armed camp of rebels; Actress Davis' mad scene is real cinematic excitement. And for Warners' star biographer, Director William Dieterle, Juárez is a bright new feather in an already well-decorated cap.