"Beau Ideal" is a film that wouldn't play very well today, as it features a white actor, Rod La Rocque, playing a Mexican bandit...and with a very strange accent to boot. As for me, what bothered me more is that the film was incredibly talky...something not all that surprising since many early talkies really accentuated talking instead of action and plot.
When the story begins, a local boss tries to hire the bandit, Montero (Rod La Rocque) to murder an enemy. However, Montero is a very odd guy and instead of killing his quarry, he tells him about the plan to pay him for murdering the guy! It's obvious Montero isn't that bad a guy after all....and soon he'll be turning the tides on this boss.
The film was slow...glacially slow. It also is quite talky and has little in the way of action. It's not a totally bad movie...occasionally it's a bit funny...but mostly it's a dull film that would have been better had they made it a year or two later when talking wasn't seen as the ultimate form of storytelling in films.
By the way, Montero supposedly has a deaf sidekick but again and again, I noticed that Montero didn't always look at the guy when he talked and he never used sign language. Speech reading (the phrase deaf people use for 'lip reading') is a very, very inexact art and few deaf folks can do it well...but none of them can do it when they aren't even looking at the speaker! They're deaf...not psychics!
When the story begins, a local boss tries to hire the bandit, Montero (Rod La Rocque) to murder an enemy. However, Montero is a very odd guy and instead of killing his quarry, he tells him about the plan to pay him for murdering the guy! It's obvious Montero isn't that bad a guy after all....and soon he'll be turning the tides on this boss.
The film was slow...glacially slow. It also is quite talky and has little in the way of action. It's not a totally bad movie...occasionally it's a bit funny...but mostly it's a dull film that would have been better had they made it a year or two later when talking wasn't seen as the ultimate form of storytelling in films.
By the way, Montero supposedly has a deaf sidekick but again and again, I noticed that Montero didn't always look at the guy when he talked and he never used sign language. Speech reading (the phrase deaf people use for 'lip reading') is a very, very inexact art and few deaf folks can do it well...but none of them can do it when they aren't even looking at the speaker! They're deaf...not psychics!