The Screengrab

By any measure, Ernesto "Che" Guevara is having as good a year in the movies as any failed revolutionary who's been dead for more than forty years has a right to expect. The word from Cannes about Steven Soderbergh's two-part film starring Benecio del Toro has been mostly upbeat, and the documentary Chevolution, about his lingering market force as a brand image, has been doing well on the festival circuit. He's also had the honor of having his romantic youth depicted onscreen in The Motorcycle Diaries. (There's also a 2005 biopic called Che, starring Eduardo Noriego of The Devil's Backbone in the title role, that's just been shuttled out on DVD to take advantage of whatever publicity the Soderbergh film generates.) But the first attempt by Hollywood to immortalize Che on film came out in 1969, when his corpse was barely cold and his face still adorned many a campus wall and Godard picture. That was Che!--note the exclamation point in the title, a sure sign of a film that intends to enthrall the viewer's or inflame his passions, as in That's Entertainment!, Tora! Tora! Tora!, and Not with My Wife, You Don't! Seen today, which is very hard to do, the movie is best experienced as a dizzying record of just how confused Hollywood was in the year of our Lord Easy Rider, as it tried to give the kids what they wanted to see even as studio heads were putting in electrified moats around their pleasure domes to keep the kids from the Spahn Ranch the hell out. The film, which stars Omar Sharif, then the movies' reigning old-style matinee-idol heartthrob, was directed by Richard Fleischer, in between his chores on two other historical dramas, The Boston Strangler and, yes, Tora! Tora! Tora!.

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It's often difficult to know exactly what it takes to qualify someone for the title of 'major American filmmaker', other than the obvious qualifications of being an American.  Some people, like Terrence Malick or Stanley Kubrick, get the nod for quality despite a major lack of quantity; others will never reach that status despite prodigious output because they're pure hacks.  But there are a few whose status is forever in dispute due to wild inconsistency; although there aren't many filmmakers whose reputation is mixed because they have such vast catalogues that it's hard to sort the wheat from the chaff, it does happen on occasion.  And if anyone qualifies for such a debate, it's Richard Fleischer.

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