--- title: "Viva Villa!" year: 1934 kind: "film" canonical: "https://film.one/film/viva-villa" fi1m_score: 66 critics_score: 73 critics_reviews: 5 published: "2026-09-19T22:43:50.636577+00:00" updated: "2026-09-19T22:44:23.417737+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Viva Villa! (1934) Directed by Jack Conway · 1h 55m · Western **Fi1m score: 66** · Critics 73 (early) from 5 reviews *In a sentence:* A revolution led by a giggling overgrown boy with a rifle, and an American reporter filing the story before it happens > MGM’s Pancho Villa is a big, loud, handsomely photographed legend with Wallace Beery grinning at its centre, and it is good fun for most of its length. It is also careless with history, cheerful about slaughter, and a reel too long. ## Synopsis Mexico, in the years before the revolution. Young Pancho Villa (Phillip Cooper) watches his father (Frank Puglia) flogged to death for protesting when the landowners take the peasants’ fields. The boy kills the man responsible and runs for the hills. He grows into a bandit (Wallace Beery) with a cheerful, murderous lieutenant, Sierra (Leo Carrillo), and a habit of shooting first and weeping afterwards. Francisco Madero (Henry B. Walthall), a gentle reformer who wants a Mexico governed by law, asks Villa to turn his raiders into an army. An American reporter, Jonny Sykes (Stuart Erwin), attaches himself to the column and files dispatches that improve on the truth. Villa also meets Teresa (Fay Wray), whose brother Don Felipe (Donald Cook) backs Madero, and the smooth General Pascal (Joseph Schildkraut), who does not. ## Review Metro’s Pancho Villa, produced by David O. Selznick from a script by Ben Hecht, wants to be two things at once: a rousing frontier legend about a peasant bandit who becomes a liberator, and an honest portrait of the appalling man underneath. It manages the first. Jack Conway is the credited director, some of the material was shot by an uncredited Howard Hawks, and more than one pair of hands shows. It is a big, handsome, noisy picture, good fun for most of its 115 minutes, and, in a way that took us a while to notice, rather pleased with murder. Wallace Beery plays Villa as an enormous child: grinning, weeping, roaring, taking a woman’s hand as though he might eat it. He asks Madero what democracy is, nods as if he has understood, and goes out and shoots somebody. His accent wanders from the Sierra Madre to the Bronx and back within a scene, and it hardly matters, because the performance is not about Mexico. It is about Beery, and Beery is a good deal to watch. When he is on screen the film has a pulse. When he is off it, waiting for him, it slumps. Stuart Erwin’s Jonny Sykes, the American newspaperman who trails the column, gets the best joke Hecht wrote. He cables home that Villa has taken a town Villa has not yet attacked, and Villa, once the dispatch is read to him, decides he had better take it so the paper is not made a liar. We laughed properly at that, and at Leo Carrillo’s Sierra, who kills with the cheer of a man doing you a favour. Henry B. Walthall gives Madero a stillness that is the nearest the film comes to an idea. Fay Wray, as Teresa, is given little to do beyond being looked at, and Joseph Schildkraut’s General Pascal is sleek, snide and useful. James Wong Howe and Charles G. Clarke shot much of it in Mexico, and the exteriors are the film’s glory: long lines of horsemen crossing dry country under a white sky, dust rising behind them, crowds packed into plazas that were plainly not built on a back lot. The tagline promises a cast of thousands and for once that is roughly true. Then the film goes indoors and you can see the join. The haciendas and cantinas are lit flat and even, like studio drawing rooms, and the cut from one to the other is like being pulled in through a window. Herbert Stothart’s score leans on ‘La Cucaracha’ until we began to dread the tune. What unsettled us, and it built as the film went on, is how lightly the killing sits. The opening, in which Frank Puglia as Villa’s father is flogged to death for asking that the peasants keep their land, is shot straight and it is horrible; we flinched. It is there to justify everything that follows, and the film then spends the next hour and a half treating that everything as a lark. Men are shot and the trial is held afterwards, as a courtesy. Villa’s tenderness towards Madero is real, and so is his good humour when the firing squad forms, and Hecht’s script does not seem to notice that the two are at war. Most critics have forgiven it this because the action is so brisk. We found it brisk and we found it cold. It plays loose with the facts, and anyone who knows the Mexican Revolution will spend the film wincing. That is not by itself a fault; Hollywood has never let history stand in the way of a good hanging. The fault is length. The picture has two or three episodes more than it needs, and the last half hour, which we will not describe, goes round the same handful of rooms before arriving at a finish Beery plays for everything it has and then a little more. It is enormous. We were somewhere between admiring it and hiding behind the sofa. See it for Beery, for Erwin’s cable, and for those exteriors, which Howe and Clarke shot as though they knew nobody would be allowed to build such a thing again. Watch it at home, where the studio interiors look less wrong, and be ready to find the hero a good deal more frightening than the film does. *Fi1m score 66, published 19 September 2026.* ### Reviews we read (5) - **The New Yorker**, John C. Mosher (85/100, inferred): For the sort of thing it is, the film is thoroughly satisfying stuff, handled with expert artisanship and featuring a gem of a performance by Wallace Beery; it is brutal, bloody, always active and alive. It is good journalism and a romantic yet likely story of the bandit’s career, though it lacks the photographic finesse of Eisenstein’s Mexican film. [Read](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1934/04/21/1934-04-21-092-tny-cards-000007084) - **The New York Times**, Mordaunt Hall (80/100, inferred): The film is a fast, furious and compelling tale mixing sentiment, humor and melodrama, with Wallace Beery giving a vigorous and impressive portrait of Pancho Villa as bandit and patriot. It is for the most part highly creditable, though a few episodes might have been excluded. [Read](https://www.nytimes.com/1934/04/11/archives/wallace-beery-as-pancho-villa-in-a-fictionized-film-biography-of.html) - **Time Out**, TJ (70/100, inferred): An uncredited Howard Hawks directed some of the material in this rumbustious traversal of the Mexican revolutionary leader's rise and fall, with Beery leading as Pancho Villa. The big MGM production plays fast and loose with the facts but there's much good humour and a terrifically hammy death scene. [Read](https://www.timeout.com/movies/viva-villa) - **Variety** (70/100, inferred): It is a corking western and a big, impressive production that sets out to make Wallace Beery’s Pancho Villa appear as a somewhat sympathetic and quasi-patriotic bandit. Beery’s characterization lets the character down somewhat with a vacillating accent, though the production values, mob scenes and supporting performances stand out. [Read](https://variety.com/1933/film/reviews/viva-villa-1117796147/) - **Radio Times**, Tony Sloman (3/5): A bravura performance by Wallace Beery as the Mexican revolutionary firebrand is the main reason for watching this intelligently crafted MGM adventure epic. Some obvious studio-bound sequences mar enjoyment and the whole thing is a tad overlong, but this is fine rollicking stuff with excellent supporting performances and well-handled crowd scenes. [Read](https://www.radiotimes.com/movie-guide/b-3enhuo/viva-villa/) ## Details - **Director:** Jack Conway - **Director:** Jack Conway - **Screenplay:** Ben Hecht - **Cinematography:** Charles G. Clarke, James Wong Howe - **Music:** Herbert Stothart - **Producer:** David O. Selznick - **Cast:** Wallace Beery as Pancho Villa; Leo Carrillo as Sierra; Fay Wray as Teresa; Donald Cook as Don Felipe de Castillo; Stuart Erwin as Jonny Sykes; Henry B. Walthall as Francisco Madero; Joseph Schildkraut as Gen. Pascal; Katherine DeMille as Rosita Morales - **Runtime:** 1h 55m - **Release (the US):** 27 April 1934 - **Genres:** Western ## Where to watch in the US Not streaming, renting or buying in the US at the last check. ## Awards - Academy Awards 1935: Best Picture (nominated); Best Sound (nominated); Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay (nominated) ## If you liked this - *Vámonos con Pancho Villa* (1936): The Mexican answer, made two years later, and far bleaker about what Villa cost his men - *Viva Zapata!* (1952): Kazan and Brando take the other revolutionary and actually think about power - *The Wild Bunch* (1969): Americans blundering through the same revolution, with the killing finally allowed to hurt - *The Champ* (1931), Fi1m 72: Beery at his most shameless and most affecting; bring a handkerchief and some scepticism — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/the-champ.md) - *Reed: Insurgent Mexico* (1973): A journalist rides with the revolution again, this time in sepia and without the jokes --- © Fi1m Ltd. 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