Word: cesar
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...manipulators. At one point in the middle sixties, he blurted out that the United States should send blood to the National Liberation Front, hardly a cagey political ploy. In the years before his 1968 bid for the Presidency, he traveled often to southern California, to help his friend Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers Union, working quietly in the days before the television cameras followed him everywhere...
...scenes are straight out of the great grape strike of the late 1960s. In Southern California's Coachella Valley, Chicano laborers again cry "Viva la Huelga" (long live the strike) at flashy sedans roaring through vineyard gates, and priests who join them are arrested for illegal picketing. Cesar Chavez again summons his workers to talk up a grape boycott. But this time, his opposition is not confined to the growers whom he signed to contracts three years ago. Now Chavez's still tiny United Farm Workers Union (28,000 members at the end of 1972) is locked...
APPETITES are large and effortlessly satisfied here; personalities are protected from tension and splintering. It's as easy as "Let's live together." For that reason the personalities in Cesar and Rosalie interact no more profoundly than billiard balls. The dramatic moments simply lack credibility. Cesar, for example, is subject to violent fits of temper occasioned by Rosalie's desertion--but the tone of the movie informs us that these are nothing but outbursts of sound and fury, moving toward no tragic destination, only emphasizing Cesar's buffoonish character. Since such incidents neither shift the equilibrium of forces nor portend...
Montand's performance, though outstanding in its breadth of characterization, further attenuates the substance of the film, for Cesar quickly develops into a doubly self-conscious showman, playing to the camera as well as the cast, with rolls of the eye and slapstick grimaces coming to dominate his personality. And the chemistry between these characters is such that when one shows off the others follow suit. Montand ultimately becomes hemmed in by his own loveable ostentation; his suicide attempt, conducted in all, seriousness, brought forth chuckles from an audience doggedly looking for a punchline...
...FILM bases its claim to our attention on pure and unabashed charisma. It works its magic so long as we are willing to suspend disbelief. But charisma, on the screen and off, must eventually perform in order to justify its hold; otherwise, it is a sham and an affront. Cesar and Rosalie doesn't perform; it really doesn't even attempt...