Forging Arizona by Anita Huizar-Hernández

Author:Anita Huizar-Hernández [Huizar-Hernández, Anita]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, United States, State & Local, Southwest (AZ; NM; OK; TX), Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, Hispanic American Studies, Latin America, Mexico
ISBN: 9780813598819
Google: cz9JuQEACAAJ
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 2019-04-05T01:07:47+00:00

CHAPTER 5

The Baron Is like a Battleground

SAMUEL FULLER’S BARON OF ARIZONA (1950)

Director Samuel Fuller’s 1950 B movie The Baron of Arizona opens to the sounds of a grand orchestral score with blaring trumpets and soaring violins as a black-and-white image of an old parchment paper appears on the screen. It reads, “On February 14, 1912, at the home of the Governor of Arizona, there was cause to celebrate, for on this day President Taft signed the proclamation that made Arizona the forty-eighth state admitted into the Union.” The parchment fades into a shot of a group of men dressed in black tie who stand in a circle. With glasses raised, the men make an exuberant toast “to the state of Arizona!” In the midst of their celebration, one of the men, a Mr. John Griff, offers a surprising toast “to a real lover of Arizona. To my friend, James Addison Reavis.” As Griff tilts his head back to take a drink, the other men look around, visibly shaken by his words. As the camera closes in on Griff’s profile, one of the other men asks, “The man who called himself the Baron of Arizona?” Griff explains that Reavis, the con artist who forged a Spanish land grant to try to steal territory in Arizona, was not so different from them. Reavis shared their love for Arizona and a desire to improve it, though his methods were less than conventional.1

The rest of the film is a flashback that begins on a dark and stormy night. In the first flashback scene, Reavis, who is played by the not-yet-famous Vincent Price, trudges through the rain to knock on the door of a run-down shack where a young orphan named Sofia lives. Inside, he informs the little girl and her guardian, Pepito Álvarez, that the girl is a baroness and the rightful heiress to a large land grant in Arizona and that he intends to help her take possession of her inheritance. The Baron of Arizona then follows Reavis around the world as he forges Spanish records, seduces beautiful women (including Sofia, whom he eventually marries), presents his case to the Court of Private Land Claims, narrowly escapes an angry lynch mob, and ultimately confesses his crimes to Griff, the government expert assigned to investigate Reavis’s claim to the Peralta Land Grant. In the final scene, which might be Fuller’s only happy ending, Reavis emerges from the Santa Fe penitentiary to find none other than the now-grown Sofia Peralta-Reavis, played by Ellen Drew, waiting for him as his devoted wife.

With the budget of a B movie, the cinematography of film noir, the scenery of a Western, and the happy ending of a romance, The Baron of Arizona is a hybrid of early to mid-twentieth-century popular film genres that defies easy categorization. Unlike Fuller’s other films, The Baron of Arizona has never enjoyed commercial or cult success. Fuller began his career in the early 1950s, at a time when large movie studios dominated the market, but was a freethinking and independent filmmaker.

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