Juarez is a good film from perhaps the greatest year in American film--1939.
Bette Davis gives a solid supporting performance as Empress Carlotta. She's especially poignant in her scenes despairing of her inability to bear an heir and her confrontation with Napoleon III. Carlotta faints and sees Napoleon as a devil when he attempts to revive her. She runs off down an increasingly darkening hallway, symbolizing her descent into madness. Designer Orry-Kelly also darkened her costumes to
symbolize her madness as the film continues (white to gray to black.)
Claude Rains is brilliant as Napoleon III. The film opens with him and his advisers coming up with the plan to set up Maximilian as Mexican emperor. Gale Sondergaard as Empress Eugenie is instrumental in the plan. Rains plays the pompous ass to perfection, posing on a wooden horse for a portrait, while meeting the American minister.
Brian Aherne plays Emperor Maximilian as a well-meaning dupe of Napoleon III. Maximilian is legitimately shocked when he learns that the plebiscite bringing him to Mexico is fraudulent. We see his form of idealism when Maximilian meets the imprisoned General
Diaz (John Garfield.) The scene provides a good background of the political
situation.
Although Paul Muni is the title character, his Juarez is rather
dull--too stately and stoic to make an impact. He has a few good scenes--continuing
to walk towards a squad of men ordered to fire on him. Another is when General Diaz discusses Maximilian's offer to make Juarez Prime Minister; Juarez dismantles Maximilian's argument that only a word, democracy, separates their beliefs.
The cast also includes Donald Crisp and Harry Davenport.
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