Juarez (1939)

Louis Napoleon III takes advantage of the American Civil War to circumvent the Monroe Doctrine and expand his power by helping Emperor Maximillian Hapsburg to add Mexico to his empire. of Mexico.

Director:

William Dieterle

Writers:

John Huston (screen play), Æneas MacKenzie (screen play) (as Aeneas MacKenzie)

Stars:

Paul Muni, Bette Davis, Brian Aherne

Nominated for 2 Oscars.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Paul Muni	...	Benito Juárez
Bette Davis	...	Carlota of Mexico
Brian Aherne	...	Maximilian I of Mexico
Claude Rains	...	Napoléon III
John Garfield	...	Porfirio Diaz
Donald Crisp	...	General Marechal Achille Bazaine
Joseph Calleia	...	Alejandro Uradi
Gale Sondergaard	...	Empress Eugénie
Gilbert Roland	...	Colonel Miguel Lopez
Henry O'Neill	...	General Miguel Miramon
Harry Davenport	...	Dr. Samuel Basch
Louis Calhern	...	Le Marc
Walter Kingsford	...	Prince Richard Metternich
Georgia Caine	...	Lady in Waiting
Montagu Love	...	Jose de Montares

Storyline

The newly-named Emperor Maximillian, the only monarch of the Second Mexican Empire, arrives in Mexico in the early 1860s with his wife Carlotta to face popular sentiment favoring Benito Juarez and popular demand for democracy. With an elite group of Mexican monarchists, Maximillian tries to appease the democratic Mexicans but he fails. Abraham Lincoln continues to support Juarez and asks the French to withdraw support for Maximilian. Carlotta goes to France to plead with Napoleon III, to no avail.

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Plot Keywords:

19th century | napoleon iii | maximilian i of mexico | french occupied mexico | french empire | 

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Taglines:

Warner Bros. present The Picture That Shows How Great The Screen Can Be!

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Genres:

Biography | Drama | History | Romance

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Certificate:

Approved

Details

Country:

USA

Language:

English Spanish

Release Date:

10 June 1939 (USA)

Also Known As:

Juárez

Filming Locations:

Warner Ranch, Calabasas, California, USA

Company Credits

Production Co:

Warner Bros.

Technical Specs

Runtime:

125 min 121 min (Turner library print) 132 min (original)

Sound Mix:

Mono

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

An English-language version of Franz Werfel's play titled "Juarez and Maximilian" opened on Broadway at the Guild Theatre on October 11, 1926, and ran for 48 performances. This stage version's cast included Alfred Lunt and Edward G. Robinson. The film is an extremely loose adaptation of Werfel's play. Juarez never appears in the stage version. The only one of Werfel's works to be quite faithfully adapted into a Hollywood film was "The Song of Bernadette", filmed in 1943 as The Song of Bernadette (1943). Werfel's play "Jacobowsky and the Colonel" was filmed by Hollywood as a Danny Kaye vehicle and re-titled Me and the Colonel (1958).

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Goofs

About 72 minutes into the film the Imperial Mexican soldiers are committing executions in a village. A young boy tears down a posting of an Imperial Decree and flees. The commander of the Imperial soldiers draws a Colt Model 1873 Single Action Army and shoots the boy down. As the film is set in 1865, this pistol will not be invented for another eight years.

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Quotes

Benito Juarez: [to Diaz] You see, Porfirio, when a monarch misrules, he changes the people, but when a presidente misrules, the people change him.

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Alternate Versions

In 1952, the film was re-released and several key scenes were removed, particularly sequences that contained dialogue that criticized countries which, in 1939 had been regarded as totalitarian, but which, by the early 1950s had become Cold War allies of the United States and could therefore no longer be criticized as imperialist adventurers. Germany and Italy, especially, former enemies in the 1940s, were now the cornerstone of NATO. The removal of these scenes obfuscated the narrative considerably, in particular, removing any clear reasons behind the execution of the Emperor Maximilian at the conclusion of the film. This revised print runs 106 minutes and is the version released on video and generally available today. The 1939 version is preserved on nitrate stock in the Warner Archive.

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Connections

Referenced in John Huston: The Man, the Movies, the Maverick (1988)

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Soundtracks

My Country Tis of Thee
(uncredited)
Music attributed to Henry Carey (1744)
Played as part of the score when America is mentioned

User Reviews

Two Films Into One Is A Bad Fit

Juarez is a film that might possibly have been better served if the concept of a mini-series had been available back in 1939. Certainly his story in its entirety with Maximilian and Carlotta as just one part of it would be a mini-series.

Benito Juarez who rose from being an illiterate Zapotec Indian from Oaxaca province in Mexico has developed into the Mexican statesman with the biggest popular appeal in American culture. Note how in the film, he is juxtaposed with Abraham Lincoln. Both men started from very humble background and rose to lead their respective nations at the same time, in times of great crises for their countries.

Paul Muni makes an impassive and stoic Juarez. It certainly is atypical of the rest of his historical characters be it Louis Pasteur, Pierre Radisson, or Emile Zola where he is quite eloquent. It's so different than what you normally see from Muni.

Juarez's story shares the screen with that of his counterpart the Emperor Maximilian. The real Maximilian was not as naive as Brian Aherne would have us believe. He knew very well his power was there while the French army was there. Yet in his own way with limited options he tried to govern as best he could. Aherne was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, but lost to Thomas Mitchell for Stagecoach.

Hollywood usually can't resist a mad act and Bette Davis might have been nominated herself had she not been already nominated for the much better Dark Victory. It really did happen that way, the high strung Carlotta just snapped when she returned to France to get help for her beleaguered husband. She lived in her private mad world for over 60 years, dying in the mid twenties of the next century.

Claude Rains registers well as emperor Louis Napoleon and with this film played both Bonaparte emperors of France. He had played the first Napoleon in Hearts Divided. Marshal Achille Bazaine played well by Donald Crisp was withdrawn with his troops because France was very concerned, rightly so, about a growing threat from a uniting Germany and couldn't waste time with imperialist ventures. I do love the fact that the French seem so concerned about the Monroe Doctrine which was nothing more than an expression of U.S. policy, always has and always will be. It had no force of law behind it, but with the Civil War over and the Union Army at the point of Appomattox being the largest army in the world at that time, that had more to do with Napoleon deciding that the western hemisphere wasn't worth it.

An interesting side note to that retrenchment policy, Louis Napoleon also withdrew French troops from Rome and the Papal States for the same reason at the same time because of threats to the home land. It removed the last block to a uniting Italy as well.

If I have a favorite among the supporting cast it is Joseph Calleia who plays Juarez's slippery Vice President who tries a palace coup d'etat and falls very short.

The one jarring note in the cast is John Garfield who sounds more like he's from the Lower East Side of New York than Mexican as Juarez supporter and future dictator of Mexico, Porfirio Diaz.

Juarez as a film is overly ambitious, it tries to tell too much in the running time allotted. A film about Juarez and a film strictly from the Maximilian/Carlotta point of view would have been far better.