Walker (film)

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Walker
Video release poster
Directed byAlex Cox
Written byRudy Wurlitzer
Produced by
Starring
CinematographyDavid Bridges
Edited by
  • Alex Cox
  • Carlos Puente
Music byJoe Strummer
Production
companies
  • In-Cine Compañía Industrial Cinematográfica
  • Northern
  • Walker Films Limited
Distributed byUniversal Pictures
Release date
  • December 4, 1987 (1987-12-04)
Running time
94 minutes
Countries
  • United States
  • Mexico
LanguagesEnglish
Spanish
Budget$6,000,000
Box office$257,043 (US)

Walker is a 1987 American-Mexican historical, hybrid/weird western film directed by Alex Cox and starring Ed Harris, Richard Masur, René Auberjonois, Peter Boyle, Miguel Sandoval and Marlee Matlin. The film is based on the life story of William Walker, the American filibuster who invaded and made himself president of Nicaragua. It was written by Rudy Wurlitzer and scored by Joe Strummer, who has a small role as a member of Walker's army.

The film is intentionally full of

anachronisms, such as: helicopters, Zippo lighters, automatic rifles, Diet Coke, magazines and cars. It was filmed in Nicaragua, during the Contra War (1979-1990).[1][2][3]

The film was released by Universal Pictures on December 4, 1987 to generally polarized reviews and grossed nearly $300 thousand against a production budget of $6 million, becoming a box-office bomb.

Plot summary

In 1853, soldier-of-fortune William Walker flees Mexico, after a failed attempt to incite an armed insurrection. He is placed on trial by US officials, but wins acquittal on breaking the

Manifest Destiny and has plans to marry and start a newspaper until his fiancée Ellen Martin dies of cholera. Financed by American multimillionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt, Walker and 60 mercenaries embark on a mission to bring stability to Nicaragua by assisting the Democratic Party in its civil war against the Legitimists. Doing so would secure Vanderbilt's rights over an overland shipping route between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean
.

Despite significant losses, Walker and his corps score a bloody victory in Nicaragua, first in

destiny
" to be there.

As Walker and his men exit the church, singing "

modern-day military gear. A man from the helicopter explains that he has been ordered by the State Department
to return all American citizens to their homeland. When he asks Walker what his nationality is, Walker replies "I'm William Walker, President of the Republic of Nicaragua," so he is left behind. The movie ends with Walker being executed on the beach by Honduran soldiers.

As the credits roll, a television screen displays various clips of President Ronald Reagan discussing the presence of U.S. troops in Nicaragua, the U.S. military conducting "training exercises" off the coast of Nicaragua, and a woman washing the dead bodies of Contras victims.

Cast

Production

Alex Cox first visited Nicaragua in 1984, during the national election campaign for which

Masterpiece Theatre because Walker "leads a disastrous misadventure. He's a pretty bad guy. I didn't think it was possible to approach it in this normal, historical, respectful style."[6]

The budget was set at six million dollars with most of the film being shot in Granada, Nicaragua. To get into character, Ed Harris led the entire cast in a 10-mile (16.1-km) forced march through the Nicaraguan countryside.[5] The actor was drawn to the challenge of playing someone "who has incredible moral convictions but turns into such an evil person in the name of spreading democracy."[7] He was also drawn to the script's politics, claiming to be anti-Contra and anti-intervention in Nicaragua and saw making a film there as a way to possibly stop the bloodshed.[7]

Cox got the cooperation of the Sandinista government and the Roman Catholic Church because he wanted his production to be a "force for peace and reconciliation."[6] The Guatemalan government, apparently in a desire to please America, held up Cox at the Nicaraguan border for a week with his entire cast and crew, obliterating his budget. Cox, producer Edward R. Pressman, and leading actor Ed Harris all donated from their own wages in order to bring the film back on track. After a report that Cox was shooting in Nicaragua appeared in The New York Times, the film bond company sent an inspector and threatened to pull the bond multiple times, requiring Cox to respond with legal threats while filming continued. The delays also meant there was limited time for reshooting. One scene where both of Walker's brothers were supposed to be present only had one appear on set. On another day, Ed Harris ad-libbed an entire speech about how America will "be back" and will never "leave Nicaragua alone". This was filmed "just in case" and ended up appearing in the final film.[8]

The dying economy of Granada received a significant boost by the production with 300 local carpenters hired to build sets, 6,000 people hired as extras and army supplied security guards and a Soviet-built MI-18 transport helicopter used in the film.[5] Electricity poles in the town plaza were torn down leaving homes without light.[9] Some families were left temporarily without a telephone because the production needed their lines and the government could not afford to install new ones. The central square was covered with several inches of dirt to recreate 1850s conditions.[9] The screenplay was edited by the country's Vice-President Sergio Ramirez and Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal, who were also a novelist and a poet respectively. Both men, along with the Minister of Education, the country's Interior Minister, and a military commander, would occasionally visit the set. Two people were accidentally killed during principal photography, both in separate vehicular-related incidents. For one of the deaths, the movie company paid for the funeral and compensated the family. The shooting conditions were difficult because of all of the fires the locals were building, making the air thick and hard to breathe.[5]

Even after filming was over, Cox stayed in Granada, editing the film. He said: "I think we have kind of a duty not to just be the rich gringos and come down here and spend eight weeks and then disappear."[5]

Historical accuracy

As noted by Roger Ebert in his review for the Chicago Sun-Times: "... anachronisms, guest stars, quixotic poker-faced heroes and utterly pointless scripts", were the hallmark of films helmed by Cox.[10] There are a number of intentional anachronisms placed to draw comparison between 1850s and 1980s Nicaragua. For example, the characters are shown reading Newsweek and Time, and a computer monitor is visible in Vanderbilt's study. As the movie progresses, the inaccuracies become more and more extreme and it is evident that Cox was using the device to accentuate modern-day events with the Walker era.

Historical accuracy is done away with in a dramatic retelling of Walker's coup d'état. There is no evidence that Walker ever met Vanderbilt or received his support, as the movie suggests.[11] Rather, Walker was supported by Vanderbilt's competitors, Charles Morgan and Cornelius Garrison, owners of the Nicaragua Transit Company in his time.[12] James Buchanan is incorrectly mentioned as being the President of the United States after Walker's trial, prior to his Nicaraguan expedition. Franklin Pierce was actually the president at the time. Ellen Martin, Walker's fiancée, died in 1850. In the movie, she is present at his 1854 trial for violating US neutrality laws, after he invaded Baja California and Sonora Mexico, dying shortly thereafter.[13]

Minor inconsistencies include use of bolt-action rifles, weapons from the World War I era, and Navy Colts in Walker's army, not in general use, until midway through the American Civil War, almost a decade later, but it was obvious that Cox was little concerned with historical accuracy.[14]

Soundtrack

Joe Strummer had worked previously with Cox on Sid and Nancy and Straight to Hell, contributing songs to their respective soundtracks.[15] He wanted to compose an entire score for a film and Walker afforded him such an opportunity. After filming his small part in the film, he would go back to his room and record bits of music onto a four-track cassette using an acoustic guitar and a little plastic synthesizer with guitarist Zander Schloss. They drew inspiration from local music played in bars – a mix of reggae, calypso and Brazilian music.[15]

Reception

Walker originally garnered polarized reviews. Rita Kempley wrote that "it's gross as it is muddled as it is absurd" in her review for The Washington Post.[14] Fellow Washington Post reviewer Desson Howe criticized the "perplexing fusion of cartoon and docudrama..."[16] In his review for Newsweek, David Ansen wrote that "[Cox's] scenes have no shape, his characters are stick figures, the wit is undergraduate and his soggy set pieces of slow-motion carnage are third-rate Peckinpah imitations."[17] Gene Siskel gave the film zero stars and called it "unquestionably one of the worst films of the year, made even more shocking because it was directed by the often inventive Alex Cox."[18] Gene Siskel's cohost Roger Ebert also gave the film a rare zero-star rating and each critic gave it a thumbs down.[19]

However Jay Scott gave the film a positive review in The Globe and Mail, arguing that "Cox exposes the limitations of historical drama in Walker with a calculated disregard of its conventions."[20] Vincent Canby also praised Cox's film in The New York Times writing that "Walker is witty, rather than laugh-out-loud funny. Without being solemn, it's deadly serious... Walker is something very rare in American movies these days. It has some nerve."[21] Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in The Chicago Reader that the film was "all over the place and excessive, but as a radical statement about the U.S.’s involvement in [Nicaragua] it packs a very welcome wallop...One can certainly quarrel with some aspects of the film’s treatment of history, but with political cowardice in commercial filmmaking so prevalent, one can only admire this movie’s gusto in calling a spade a spade, and the exhilaration of its anger and wit."[22] Jim Hoberman praised it in The Village Voice as "a superbly scurrilous and daringly self-destructive attack on the Reagan regime’s Central American policies (and the Monroe Doctrine as well). In his burlesque retelling the story of William Walker, 19th century “freebooter” who ruled Nicaragua, Cox refuses to recreate the past — or even dignify it."[23] Ben Sachs in The Chicago Reader would later observe that the film's reputation had grown steadily since its release and was now regarded as "one of the key films of its era."[24]

Director Alex Cox was never employed again by a major Hollywood studio, and his subsequent films have received only limited distribution in the United States. In a 2008 interview with The A.V. Club, Cox said: "Distribution is controlled by the studios, and I've been on the blacklist of the studios for the last 20 years... The last movie I was asked to direct was The Running Man... which was actually quite a good film, I thought. I would have liked to have done The Running Man. It was just that Walker happened at the same time."[25]

On Rotten Tomatoes, Walker presently holds a rating of 44% from 16 reviews.[26]

Awards

Walker was nominated for the Golden Bear at the 38th Berlin International Film Festival.[27]

Home media releases

The Criterion Collection released a Region 1 DVD on February 19, 2008 with features that include: an audio commentary by Cox and screenwriter Wurlitzer; Dispatches from Nicaragua, an original documentary about the filming of Walker; On Moviemaking and the Revolution, reminiscences 20 years later from an extra on the film; behind-the-scenes photographs; and a booklet featuring writings by film critic Graham Fuller, Wurlitzer and Linda Sandoval.[28]

On January 18, 2022, Criterion announced that Walker will be receiving a Region A Blu-ray upgrade on April 12, 2022.[29] The upgraded release will include all of the 2008 DVD's special features along with a "restored high-definition digital transfer, [and an] uncompressed monaural soundtrack," approved by the film's director. Also included are two short films by Cox, Walker 2008 and On the Origins of “Walker,” and a trailer for the film.[30]

See also

References

  1. ^ Walker - Harvard Film Archive
  2. ^ Free Alex Cox event in Arberdeen|Den of Geek
  3. ^ Historical Dictionary of Postmodernist Literature and Theater - Google Books (pg.346)
  4. ^ Goldstein, Patrick. "Hollywood Invades Nicaragua". Los Angeles Times, April 19, 1987. Retrieved: February 26, 2012.
  5. ^ a b c d e f Grove, Lloyd. "Hollywood Invades Nicaragua". The Washington Post, August 20, 1987.
  6. ^ a b c d Van Gelder, Lawrence. "At the Movies". The New York Times, December 4, 1987.
  7. ^ a b Yakir, Dan. "For Harris, The Appeal was Political". The Globe and Mail, December 11, 1987.
  8. ^ Cox, Alex (2008). X films : true confessions of a radical filmmaker. Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press. pp. 140, 141, 147, 155, 160.
  9. ^ a b Ford, Peter. "Desperado with a Mission". Financial Times, August 22, 1987.
  10. ^ Ebert, Roger. "Walker (1987)" Archived 2010-08-27 at the Wayback Machine. Chicago Sun-Times, December 4, 1987. Retrieved: February 26, 2012.
  11. ^ Doubleday 1886, pp. 105–106.
  12. ^ Harrison 2004, p. 105.
  13. ^ Harrison 2004, p. 176.
  14. ^ a b Kempley, Rita. "Tripped Up in Time". The Washington Post, December 4, 1987.
  15. ^ a b Dafoe, Chris. "Hollywood Knocks on Strummer's Door". The Globe and Mail, December 11, 1987.
  16. ^ Howe, Desson. "Walker". The Washington Post, December 4, 1987.
  17. ^ Ansen, David. "A Yankee Devil's Manifest Destiny". Newsweek, December 7, 1987.
  18. ^ Siskel, Gene (December 4, 1987). "Siskel's Flicks Picks". Chicago Tribune. Section 7, pages N-O.
  19. ^ The Duxorcist, Walker, Manon of the Spring, The Dead, Happy New Year, 1987 – Siskel and Ebert Movie Reviews
  20. ^ Scott, Jay. "A Remarkable Cabaret Biography". The Globe and Mail, December 4, 1987.
  21. ^ Canby, Vincent. "'Walker'". The New York Times, December 4, 1987.
  22. ^ Rosenbaum, Jonathan (Feb 1, 1988). "Walker". Chicago Reader. Retrieved Oct 16, 2022.
  23. ^ Hoberman, Jim (Apr 20, 2011). "Walker". Village Voice. Retrieved Oct 17, 2022.
  24. ^ Sachs, Ben (Aug 31, 2017). "An interview with director Alex Cox about Walker, one of the most audacious American films of the 1980s". Chicago Reader. Retrieved Oct 16, 2022.
  25. ^ Murray, Noel (Mar 3, 2008). "Alex Cox interview". The A.V. Club. Retrieved Dec 24, 2015.
  26. ^ "Walker". Rotten Tomatoes.
  27. ^ "Berlinale: 1988 Programme". berlinale.de. Retrieved: February 26, 2012.
  28. Criterion Collection
    , November 19, 2007. Retrieved: February 26, 2012.
  29. ^ "APRIL 2022 Criterion Titles". Twitter. 18 January 2022. Retrieved 2022-02-28.
  30. ^ "Walker". The Criterion Collection. Retrieved 2022-02-28.

Bibliography

External links