Che! Film Comment Selects Special Screening
Tuesday, October 28 at 6:35pm
Ace journeyman director Richard Fleischer’s widescreen biopic of Che Guevara is one strange and improbable artifact: It stars the dashing Omar Sharif in a surprisingly convincing performance, features Jack Palance as Fidel Castro, was funded and produced by a Hollywood studio within a year of Che’s death at the height of the Vietnam War, and addresses serious and important issues including nuclear brinkmanship and the relative merits of national autonomy and internationalism.
The bifurcated, fractured picture delivers a distinctly non-idealized, hard-hitting take on its subject and revolutions in general, juxtaposing the dead Che with Mao’s Red Guards and student demonstrators in the U.S. and intercutting Castro’s victory parades with Che’s revolutionary executions.
Insofar as Che! has a hero, it is Castro; despite the ever-present, never-lit cigar, Palance avoids stereotype, never attempts an accent and plays it reasonably straight. Che effectively emerges as the film’s villain, a doctor who abandons his medical bag and lives like a hermit killer-priest. Sharif plays him as a humorless, pompous narcissist and it’s an accurate portrayal as far as it goes—far more interesting than the laughing poster-boy of recent memoirs and Walter Salles’s The Motorcycle Diaries.
Admission:
$11 public
$8 senior (62+)
$7 Film Society member & student (with ID)
$7 child (6-12, accompanied by an adult)
Please note: $1.25 service charge per ticket ordered online and cash only transactions at the box office.
