Mexican Filibusters: An Incident in the Recent Uprising (1911)
Production Company: Kalem Co. Director: Kenean Buel. Cast: Carlyle Blackwell (Pedro), Alice Joyce (Blanca Alvarez). Transfer Note: Copied at 16 frames per second from two 35mm prints, preserved by George Eastman House and the Museum of Modern Art. New Music: Michael D. Mortilla. Running Time: 16 minutes.

Featured in Treasures 5: The West, 1898-1938.

If one were to judge from early films, the American Southwest had been all but abandoned by Mexican Americans. This was as much a pattern in nonfiction films (see The Indian-detour in Treasures 5) as in narrative ones. But with Mexican Filibusters, as well as The Better Man and Ammunition Smuggling on the Mexican Border (also in Treasures 5), we can sample a range of exceptions.

Mexican Filibusters is set in the Texas borderlands and when it was released on March 3, 1911, the decade-long Mexican Revolution, which had begun less than four months earlier, could look like a passing event—hence the subtitle An Incident in the Recent Uprising. Promoted as “an actual occurrence in the present troubles in Mexico,” the film itself abandons any such pretense and settles into an action melodrama about U.S.-based arms smugglers. As we’ll see represented again, in Ammunition Smuggling on the Mexican Border, the Mexican Revolution very much involved both sides of the porous U.S.-Mexico border.

Mexican Filibusters is evidently missing its first intertitle, and so we’re thrown into a somewhat-confusing opening. We’re in the El Paso office of “M. Alvarez & Co.,” dealers—as we read on the office door—in “Mexican Goods.” A visit from Alvarez’s wife and daughter reveals romantic tensions: His daughter, Blanca, and one of his employees, Pedro, have eyes for each other, to the jealousy of another worker, Monte, and the disapproval of the parents. This is all brushed aside when a telegram arrives requesting that “agricultural implements” be shipped immediately to a “pack train waiting at Sonora Cañon.” The message turns out to be code for initiating secret arms transport to Mexico.

There are several remarkable and (among surviving films) unprecedented aspects to Mexican Filibusters, especially the extent to which it takes a rooting interest in Mexican revolutionaries, even as they elude and outwit U.S. Secret Service agents. True, the stereotype of the lazy Mexican is here too, in the person of sombreroed Monte, who turns informant after being reprimanded by Alvarez for refusing to help load arms onto the train. But Monte is disdained by all, including the Secret Service agents who pay him. (A “United States Treasury Dept.” sign is only partly visible on the top left corner of the shot as Monte sneaks into their building.)

Both title words add to the puzzle. We’re evidently alongside Mexican Americans—rather than Mexicans—but the distinction wasn’t yet common. Filibusters, in the usual U.S. military usage, were Anglo adventurers out for private plunder and political power in Latin America, but the term was expanded at this time to include anyone carrying arms into Mexico (as in a February 1911 headline: “U.S. CAVALRY SHOOT MEXICAN FILIBUSTERS AT EL PASO”).

The particular historical moment of the film helps us make sense of its surprising sympathies. After Mexico’s repressive dictator of 35 years, Porfirio Díaz, declared himself victor again in the 1910 elections, many opposition figures took refuge in the United States. Announcing from San Antonio his armed resistance was the sympathetically liberal Francisco Madero, who would become Mexico’s next president. Madero crossed from Texas into Mexico in November 1910 and (after being forced back) again in February 1911, just three weeks before the release of this film. However mixed were the feelings and contradictory the laws within the United States, a film that cheered those fighting for the removal of Díaz was evidently not unthinkable in March 1911.

Still, the film “stirred up a local hornet’s nest,” according to Moving Picture World a month later, which suspected a campaign against it by the Díaz government: “Objections to the film have been pouring into the [Los Angeles] district attorney’s office ever since its release. Most of the objections, it is hinted, have come through the influence of the Mexican Consul…. District Attorney [John D.] Fredericks yesterday said that rigid censorship will be exercised on all moving pictures dealing with the Mexican Revolution.” Moving Picture World came to the defense of Mexican Filibusters: It had “nothing objectionable and much that was commendable. In the first place there was no bloodshed and brutality as alleged. The story was unusual and interesting and very well acted and directed.” The Kalem Company was not intimidated from making further films about the revolution, but its point of view shifted after Madero became president. A year later the two lead actors of Mexican Filibusters were cast in Kalem’s The Gun Smugglers, in which the traffickers into Mexico have become murderous criminals.

Mexican Filibusters was an early production at Kalem’s expanded West Coast studio, north of Los Angeles in Verdugo Canyon, and with downtown Glendale standing in for El Paso. After that extended opening shot in the office, it’s a typically lively film from Kalem, which would come to specialize in the railroad action seen here. Blanca is played by 20-year-old Alice Joyce, whose dark beauty led Kalem to cast her as Indians and Mexicans in her first films. In a 1915 Ladies’ World popularity poll, with a reputed million votes, she was second only to Mary Pickford, and she would have a starring career throughout the silent era. Blanca is the one to track the double-dealing Monte to the American agents, prompting her to join Pedro on the now more dangerous smuggling mission. After he’s shot in the shoulder, she’s the one to help Pedro over the railcar roof and to pull the pin that frees the ammunition freight car. Around such a resourceful, adventurous woman Kalem would craft its long-running railroad series The Hazards of Helen (1914–17).

Another difficult-to-read sign helps clarify the ending of Mexican Filibusters. In the final shots the small white pole on the right reads “Mexico/International,” signifying that the resolution takes place on Mexican soil. The reactions of the three Secret Service riders, when they catch up, are keenly played. After Pedro points out that the ammunition burro train is now far over the border, they show a moment of rage—then shift to ungrudging admiration. Pedro has earned one agent’s handshake, even as his shoulder wound makes him flinch. Beyond that, after Alvarez and his wife drive up in anger (mainly, it seems, because their daughter has run off with Pedro), the three U.S. agents add their testimony to Blanca’s about Pedro’s success under duress, leading the parents to embrace into their family this Mexican revolutionary hero and heroine. There’s little like this elsewhere in American film! —Scott Simmon

About the Preservation
A viewing copy of Mexican Filibusters was struck from the Museum of Modern Art’s preservation negative in 2010 with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation. That 35mm print was combined with another from George Eastman House—preserved in 1993 with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts—for the fuller video version here.

Further Viewing
Two 1915 episodes of Kalem’s Hazards of Helen series are in other Treasures DVDs. Episode 26, “The Wild Engine,” is in More Treasures from American Film Archives, and episode 13, “The Escape on the Fast Freight,” is in Treasures III.