The Mark of Zorro (5 page)

Equally popular was Bernardo, Don Diego's servant. He does not appear until halfway through the novel, where he is described as a deaf and dumb Indian without much intelligence. He appears only briefly in the Fairbanks film and not at all in the Power one. But Disney's writers turned him into a major character, played with comic skill by Earl Sheldon, who is mute but only pretends to be deaf, so that he will be allowed to overhear what is going on without being suspected. Being mute affords Sheldon the opportunity for a lot of amusing mime, gestures, and facial expressions. For the first time, Zorro's black horse, nameless in the novel, is called Tornado and is changed to Toronado in later films. There is no romantic equivalent to Lolita. Zorro himself is no longer a mincing fop but masquerades as a slightly bewildered bookworm.

The series was an enormous success, and its title song became a bestseller. Zorro mania generated eighty-eight toys and other merchandise, including a sword with chalk on the point so that children could mark walls, furniture, and each other with Zs.
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Dell Comic Books did a series based upon Disney's
Zorro.
But Walt Disney ended Zorro after two years because it was filmed in black and white, and he was committed to The Wonderful World of Color on NBC. Two movies were put together from episodes from the TV series, and in 1960-1961, in response to popular demand, four one-hour Zorro specials were presented.
Zorro
was syndicated from 1965-1967, and when the Disney cable channel appeared in 1983, it reran Zorro, which was subsequently colorized in 1992.
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Following the Zorro mania generated by Disney, twenty-six Zorro movies were made between 1960 and 1975, produced cheaply in Italy, Spain, and Mexico, most of them with unknown or minor players, and departing wildly from the original Zorro. Among them are
The Sign of Zorro
(with Errol Flynn's son Sean),
Shadow of Zorro, Zorro the Avenger, Zorro Versus Maciste
(an ancient world strongman),
Zorro
at the Court
of
Spain,
Zorro
and the Three Musketeers, and The Three Swords
of
Zorro.

The last film is of interest chiefly in being set in Baja Mexico, where Zorro is not a caballero but a mixed-blood peasant, who does not wear a mask and is named Zorro by the oppressed people whom he has been trying to lead. The evil governor burns out the village of shacks where Zorro lives and kills his wife, but their infant son is rescued and left for adoption at the mission. For the next ten years, Zorro is pursued and is finally captured at the inn where the son he does not know exists is living. The governor kills the foster mother and has Zorro imprisoned. Fifteen years later, the son (Guy Stockwell), who works at the inn and is bell ringer at the mission, puts on a Zorro costume to fight oppression, is imprisoned with the man he learns is his father, and helps Zorro escape. Together with his foster sister (the third sword), they undo the governor, who is hauled off to prison in Mexico City.

The best of the foreign films is
Zorro,
starring Alain Delon (1974), which takes place in South America, in a country called Nueva Aragona, where most of the peasants are Africans rather than Mexican or Indian. The aristocrats wear eighteenth-century costumes and live in elaborate palaces. When the newly appointed governor is murdered in Barcelona, he asks Don Diego to impersonate him. Arriving in Nueva Aragona with Bernardo, Diego finds that Colonel Huerta (Stanley Baker) has established martial law. As governor, Diego pretends to be an intimidated dandy but appears as Zorro when, as in the original novel, a priest is being flogged for allegedly selling rotten hides. In this and subsequent episodes, Zorro does spectacular stunt work and makes fools of the soldiers with a series of comic booby traps. The heroine is the aristocratic Hortensia Pulido, who dresses in peasant clothing and tries to rouse the people against extortion and exploitation. When Colonel Huerta tries to make violent love to her, Zorro makes him get on his knees and beg her pardon, as he did to Captain Ramón in the novel. At the end, after Zorro has released slaves from a mine, the people start to revolt, and the soldiers will no longer obey Colonel Huerta, Zorro fights a duel with him that is one of the longest and most spectacular on film; at the climax, Zorro says, “Let it be the moment of truth,” pulls off his mask, and gives Huerta a fatal thrust. Though the script is only fair, Zorro has a good production, lively action, an excellent cast, and a dashing performance by Delon.

In the same year, an ABC movie of the week featured a television version in color of
The Mark of Zorro,
using the script of the 1940 film, slightly condensed, and Alfred Newman's score. Frank Langella was acceptable as the fop but not very dashing as the masked adventurer, and Ricardo Montalban lacked Basil Rathbone's sneering menace as Captain Pasquale. The swordplay was tame.

Following the pornographic
The Erotic Adventures of Zorro
(1972), George Hamilton starred in the amusing parody
Zorro, the Gay Blade
(1980) in which the dual aspects of Don Diego Vega are split between two sons, Diego, who inherits the mantle of Zorro, and his twin brother, who is flamboyantly gay and has renamed himself Bunny Wiggles-worth. The first swashes, the other swishes, flouncing about in a fashion show of Zorro costumes in a variety of colors, including shocking pink, while his brother is recovering from a wound.

The next year Zorro appeared in an animated thirteen-episode Saturday morning TV series by Filmation. Then in 1983, Disney produced five episodes of
Zorro and Son,
a slapstick sitcom with Henry Darrow as the first Hispanic actor to play Zorro in an American film; Paul Regina played his son. Darrow had been the voice of Zorro in the Filmation animated series.

In 1990 Zorro made a major comeback with the
New World Zorro,
a four-year-long television series of eighty-eight half-hour episodes, filmed in Spain and starring Duncan Regehr, a Canadian actor who had done Shakespeare at Stratford, Ontario, and had also played Errol Flynn on television. Like Disney's Zorro, his Don Diego was not a fop but used philosophy and writing poetry as a cover. Far from being timorous, he spoke out boldly against tyranny and was imprisoned for doing so. After the first season, Henry Darrow took over as Alejandro de la Vega. Disney's lovable fat Sergeant Garcia now became Sergeant Mendoza (James Victor), and the deaf mute Bernardo was changed to a handsome teenager, Felipe (Juan Diego Botto), whom Don Diego eventually adopted. Don Diego maintained a long-running but not very passionate romance with Victoria Escalante (Patrice Martinez), the proprietress of a taverna. The episodes had Zorro fighting such timeless issues as environmental degradation, bigotry, superstition, and of course, varieties of oppression.

The final four episodes were an ongoing story that was turned into a particularly good film called
Zorro: Conspiracy of Blood.
It opens in 1793 in Spain, where a childless midwife drugs Señora de la Vega so that she does not know she has delivered twins. The midwife steals the older of the two and raises him as her own son, while the other son is sent to his father in California. In 1824, the elder son, called Risendo, arrives in Los Angeles as the emissary of the King of Spain. (Never mind that Mexico became independent of Spain in 1821.) The emissary uses the fact that Spain is at war with France to establish martial law that will let him do anything he wishes, and to impose a huge war tax. To instill fear, he sentences the
alcalde
to be torn apart by horses for supposed incompetence, but Sergeant Mendoza refuses to carry out the order. Zorro appears, cuts the ropes, and rescues the
alcalde.
The emissary then orders the
alcalde
and Sergeant Mendoza to capture Zorro within three days or face death. Indoctrinated by his mother to hate and destroy the de la Vegas, Risendo uses Machiavellian methods to turn the townspeople against them and to attempt to turn father against son. As played with relish by James Horan, he is arguably the most complex and hateful villain in all the Zorro films, “a walking pestilence,” as Don Alejandro calls him. After much plotting and lots of action, he gets his just deserts and justice is restored.

Telecast on the Family cable network,
New World Zorro
was not as universally available as the Disney series, but it was shown in thirty-five countries around the world.
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Alma Burnette, teacher in a Kentucky inner-city school, used Zorro to show her students courage, compassion, fighting for ideals, and made available a
Zorro in the Classroom
guide that reached some 140,000 students and caused the National Education Association to recommend New World
Zorro.
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In 1998, TriStar released the most epic Hollywood Zorro and one of the best—
The Mask of Zorro
. It begins in 1821, when a middle-aged Zorro (Anthony Hopkins) performs what he thinks will be his last heroic feat, rescuing from a firing squad three men that he does not know the departing Spanish governor, Don Raphael Montero (Stuart Wilson), is using for bait. Aided by two street urchins, Joaquin and Alejandro Murrieta, to whom he gives a medallion, Zorro escapes, but Montero and his troops follow and surprise him with his wife and infant daughter, kill the wife, and throw Zorro into a dungeon, where he festers for twenty years while his daughter Elena (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is being raised in Spain as Montero's daughter.

In 1841, Montero returns, plotting to buy California from General Santa Anna and become its ruler. When he visits the dungeon to see if Zorro is still alive, Zorro manages to escape and seeks revenge. Also burning for revenge is Alejandro Murrieta, brother of the bandit Joaquin Murrieta, killed by Montero's ally, an American army officer, Captain Love (Matt Letscher), who keeps Joaquin's head preserved in a jar of whiskey. Finding Alejandro with the medallion he had given the brothers who helped him, Zorro decides to turn him into a younger Zorro to help him defeat Montero. There is much humor as Hopkins, playing a sort of Zorro emeritus, transforms the bearded, uncouth, and ignorant bandit into a clean-shaven, polished gentleman as well as an accomplished swordsman. At the same time, Alejandro falls in love with Elena, in a series of erotically charged encounters, including a swordfight with her in a stable and a dance at the palace, where he is masquerading as an emissary from Spain while the older Zorro pretends to be his servant Bernardo. Eventually, she learns who her real father is. Originally, Stephen Spielberg, a lifelong Zorro fan, planned to direct, but he ended up as a producer, and the film was directed with brio by Martin Campbell. This time, the characterizations are richer and more complex than in earlier Zorro movies; at the same time, there are many acrobatic sequences, spectacular stunts, and lots of excellent swordplay as the two Zorros foil the plot of Montero and Love to take over California.

There are several anachronisms: though his supposed head really was exhibited in a jar, Joaquin Murrieta was killed not in 1841 but in 1853; and Santa Anna is supposedly willing to consider selling California because he needs money to fight the United States, but the Mexican War did not begin until 1846. These caveats are trifling in the face of the rousing adventure of love and honor and the romatic sweep of the drama.

Despite Zorro's worldwide popularity as a Mexican hero, not everyone is a fan. Playwright Luis Valdez recalled seeing the Fairbanks 1920 film when he was “an eight-year-old migrant Chicano kid” and wondering “who is this guy who is supposed to be me?”
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Years later, as playwright and filmmaker, he reflected on the films in an era of “Mexican immigrant-bashing” in California and the problems of making a politically correct Zorro for the 1990s.
⁵⁰
Valdez himself in
Bandido!
examined the contrast between the historical Tiburcio Vasquez and the exploitation of his career in stage melodramas.
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In the process Valdez satirizes the stereotype, stating in his preface to
Bandido!
that “the history of the Old West is such a blend of fiction, fact, conjecture, and sheer poppycock that it amounts to a flawed American mythology under constant revision.”
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Certainly the villains in the Zorro films are a series of evil Spanish or Mexican governors,
alcaldes, and commandantes.
In the historical record, there were enough villainous officials from both nations to make this part of the legend credible. In the majority of the films there is virtually no visible middle class; there are the military, friars,
caballeros,
and peons ; whether Indian or Mexican or both, the latter are particularly stereotyped. In the films, most aristocrats speak with impeccable Anglo accents, while the lower classes use Spanish accents. A related issue is the claim that Zorro was not played by a Hispanic actor until Henry Darrow in
Zorro and Son
(1983) and Antonio Banderas in The Mask of
Zorro
(1998). Ironically, Banderas, a Spaniard, with all the myth's associations of the proud and ancient lineage of Spain, portrays a brother of the infamous Murrieta, a commoner who must learn swordsmanship and aristocratic manners from the aging Zorro, played by the Welsh Anthony Hopkins. The casting of Zorro involves several issues, from the current disputes surrounding immigration policy to the underrepresentation of Latinos in film, both in front of and behind the camera, and the fact that they have been too often portrayed as stereotypes: the Latin lover, the
señorita,
the spitfire, the
dueña,
and the buffoon, who is usually a fat sidekick or sergeant, a Sancho Panza to Zorro's Don Quixote. Despite such caveats, Zorro has been enormously popular in Latin and South America, and hordes of admirers mobbed Guy Williams when he visited Argentina.

By the 1990s, Zorro mania became epidemic. Zorro toys, games, puppets, collectible cards, and memorabilia proliferated all over the world. Internationally, dozens of commercials had products endorsed by Zorro. Spinoff books began to appear. Jim Luceno novelized
The Mask of Zorro
for adults, and Frank Lauria did so for children. Sandra R. Curtis, vice president of Zorro Productions, wrote seven Zorro novels for young readers that were published in eight European countries.
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Tor Books and Pocket Books each brought out a series of new Zorro novels.
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