Finney, of course, has had extensive theater experience and is clear about the differences between the two forms. “The most elusive thing about film acting is that when they say go, or when they say action, you’ve got to be in the state of mind to do it. You’ve been sitting around for two hours, while they are tinkering around with this, that, and the other thing, and then someone will say, ’OK, we’re ready; we don’t want to lose the light.’ And I think you must be ready. I suppose that’s theater training: when the curtain goes up at seven-thirty, it’s no good saying you’ll be ready at ten … I prefer that we do it on take one; we don’t have to keep flogging ourselves. But I also think the operator, the film puller, the sound man, the camera man should be ready, too. That doesn’t always happen.
“Therefore, in movies, an actor has to spend most of the day sort of being on simmer. Obviously, when it’s lunchtime, you get away from it; but sometimes I like to think about it, just brood over it, sit in a chair and look down into the barranca and fret. If I think it’s going to be useful …On some days it might be useful to just go and play catch ball with the boys. Sometimes you wake up in the morning, and you think you’ve got a feeling, a little feeling, you’re ready for the day’s work, and you want to nurse this feeling and use it. And then about twelve-thirty or something, you look for it, and say, ‘Where’s that feeling? Where did it go? It’s gone. Gone.’ That’s the intangible thing about film. You can stay so long on simmer that you evaporate.”
At the end of Under the Volcano, Finney utters the Consul’s dying words: “Christ, what a dingy way to die.” And yet the scene is not dingy; it is genuinely tragic. Through the power of Finney’s performance, we’ve seen the Consul revealed as a remarkable man, which transforms his stupid, dingy death into something of enormous artistic value. One reason is that Finney has infused the part with so many complicated feelings.
“I suppose what I might do better than anything else is somehow record feeling,” Finney said one Sunday afternoon. “If I was a painter, I’d record light and shade and color. But I record feeling, and so I think about feeling a lot. And then channel it into a role where I think it might be useful. That’s part of what acting’s all about, I think. One uses anything. And, yes, one is ruthless. Because there is no one way of going down the road, is there? There can’t be. There’re too many things, too much of a variety, too many possibilities for there to be one correct way. And if that’s how one does it, well, that’s what one does. I’ve not caused anyone’s death. I’ve not pressed any buttons or triggers in my life. Do you know what I mean? I might have been ruthless in my later use of emotions, and people’s pain. But no lives have been lost.”
Finney paused. Through the windows of his suite, we could see tennis players and old men cleaning lawns and a bus taking tourists on the mandatory ride to the pyramids or the volcanoes. “At its best, acting hopefully does help to ameliorate human behavior,” he said. “At its simplest, it’s often just maudlin. Some jobs you think — Well, it’s a bit like that. But at its best, when you get something that is really demanding and you have a go, it’s very honorable work. It’s also telling a story. But at its best, I think that somehow a recognition of ourselves might come about. In this film, we might know the Consul. We might know ourselves.” Finney smiled. “At least one likes to think so.”
AMERICAN FILM,
July-August 1984
IN ZAPATA COUNTRY
Each day after lunch, we walked under the hot, scoured Mexican sky to the center of the town of Tepoztlán. Off to the left were the sour remains of old cane fields where shirtless kids played soccer in the dust. Down the broad valley behind us, we could see men riding horses and the sudden glint of sun on a machete. In the town’s graveyard, tiny cones of dust whirled among the headstones. On both sides of the valley were the mountains of Morelos.
Those mountains, surrounding this town about 60 miles south of Mexico City, are a spectacular sight: sheer cliffs, sudden crags, rocky formations that seem split by some cosmic ax. Behind them, other mountains rise, big and broad-shouldered, with the dark purple silhouettes of still more beyond — all part of the Sierra Madre, the primordial spine of Mexico. Each day, as my wife and I walked to town, they became as familiar as the road itself.
A half mile from the house where we were staying, the modern two-lane blacktop abruptly gave way to 18th-century cobblestones and rose steeply into the town. Here, visiting automobiles slowed to a crawl in a tenuous and losing negotiation with the colonial past. At the top of that steeply terraced hill, sitting in doorways, wearing the familiar white pajamas of the campesino — the countryman — their eyes cloudy with the past, their faces gullied by time, were the last old soldiers of the man who once was the revolutionary master of these mountains: Emiliano Zapata.
“Si, fue un Zapatista,” an old man told me one afternoon. Yes, I was a Zapatista. Then he paused, in modest clarification: “We all fought. In Tepoztlán, we were all Zapatistas.”
The sight of these old men moved me in complicated ways. I’ve been going to Mexico since the mid-1950s, when I was a student there on the GI Bill. In 1956, on the Transportes del Norte bus heading south from Laredo, I carried Zapata in my psychic baggage, or at least the version of the great revolutionary leader that Marlon Brando played in Viva Zapata! In that fine, tragic 1952 movie, directed by Elia Kazan, Brando gave Zapata a muted and melancholy grandeur. For once, the movies got it right; over the years, as I studied the history of this great, tormented country, it became clear that Viva Zapata! might be of limited use as literal history, but was absolutely true as legend.
Here in the village of Tepoztlán, among the mountains of Morelos, was the proof. The legend lived. But for these old men, Emiliano Zapata wasn’t simply a character in a movie, a figure in a mural, or a name, in the history of the 1910-1920 Mexican Revolution. He had lived, he’d fought, he’d died here. Or in places within a day’s horseback ride or three days’ walk. These men saw him, heard him speak. “All of Morelos followed him,” one man said. “Right to the end.”
Even today, many decades after his death, the spirit of the Zapatista struggle seems to permeate Morelos, while haunting Mexico. “He is one of our legendary heroes,” wrote the great Mexican writer Octavio Paz. “Realism and myth are joined in this ardent, melancholy, and hopeful figure who died as he had lived: embracing the earth.”