Viva Zapata!

Viva Zapata! (1952), directed by Elia Kazan, is a historical drama you can watch online on iFILM. Marlon Brando plays Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican peasant leader who rose against Porfirio Díaz's dictatorship in the early twentieth century — and found that reaching power was not the same thing as knowing what to do with it.

The film opens with Zapata as a petition-bearer: he walks into the presidential palace to argue for his village's land. Díaz circles the village name on a map. Zapata understands the signal immediately. From there the film tracks his arc through guerrilla warfare, an alliance with Pancho Villa, and ultimately the presidency itself — a chair that sits wrong on a man who spent his life fighting the men who sit in chairs. Anthony Quinn plays his brother Eufemio with enough reckless heat to walk off with his scenes; the role gave Quinn his first Oscar. John Steinbeck wrote the screenplay.

Kazan wasn't interested in a monument. The film's sharpest insight is that revolution can corrupt its own leaders just as thoroughly as the regimes they replace. Brando, still building the internal method he'd fully deploy the following year in On the Waterfront, finds a Zapata who is thoughtful and dangerous in equal measure. The film picked up five Academy Award nominations. Stream Viva Zapata! (1952) on iFILM.