By any measure, Ernesto "Che" Guevara is having as good a year in the movies as any failed revolutionary who's been dead for more than forty years has a right to expect. The word from Cannes about Steven Soderbergh's two-part film starring Benecio del Toro has been mostly upbeat, and the documentary Chevolution, about his lingering market force as a brand image, has been doing well on the festival circuit. He's also had the honor of having his romantic youth depicted onscreen in The Motorcycle Diaries. (There's also a 2005 biopic called Che, starring Eduardo Noriego of The Devil's Backbone in the title role, that's just been shuttled out on DVD to take advantage of whatever publicity the Soderbergh film generates.) But the first attempt by Hollywood to immortalize Che on film came out in 1969, when his corpse was barely cold and his face still adorned many a campus wall and Godard picture. That was Che!--note the exclamation point in the title, a sure sign of a film that intends to enthrall the viewer's or inflame his passions, as in That's Entertainment!, Tora! Tora! Tora!, and Not with My Wife, You Don't! Seen today, which is very hard to do, the movie is best experienced as a dizzying record of just how confused Hollywood was in the year of our Lord Easy Rider, as it tried to give the kids what they wanted to see even as studio heads were putting in electrified moats around their pleasure domes to keep the kids from the Spahn Ranch the hell out. The film, which stars Omar Sharif, then the movies' reigning old-style matinee-idol heartthrob, was directed by Richard Fleischer, in between his chores on two other historical dramas, The Boston Strangler and, yes, Tora! Tora! Tora!.
It begins in the Cuban bush, where Che, pounding along with Fidel Castro's guerrilla army, is disgruntled because he wants to prove himself a fighter. But because of that damned medical degree of his, Fidel keeps him on trench foot duty instead of unleashing him as the righteous terminator he knows he could be. It must be especially hard for him to take, because Fidel is played by Jack Palance, decked out in a beard and a false nose that looks as if it ought to come off with his eyeglasses. Eventually, Fidel recognizes his friend's physical courage and killer instincts, or maybe he's just grateful to him for not falling down laughing when Fidel makes radio speeches into a microphone, striding around and frantically waving his arms as if he were trying to direct an air strike on the film set to put him out of his misery, even though he has no audience that can see him except for Che and the circling birds. The high point of the movie comes when Che and Fidel have cross words after Che thinks the big boy caved during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Taking to his bed with a bottle, Fidel howls after Che that he knows that he never really cared about the revolution, in tones not especially dissimilar to those Joan Crawford would have used to tell her departing lover that she knows now that he never really wanted her, he was just using her to get to her daughter.
The last section of the movie, dealing with the Bolivian misadventure that ended Guevara's life, includes split-screen sequences that force connections between Che's activities and images of worldwide political unrest, as well as a number of scenes that would only be perfected two years later when Woody Allen reworked and improved on them in Bananas. Like a great many things conceived in the tumultuous year of 1968, such as the Democratic National Convention, the Nixon administration, and my parents' marriage, Che! wound up pleasing nobody. Conservatives were appalled that the studio was trying to make money by celebrating a Communist thug, radicals were angry that the studio was trying to make money by exploiting their martyred hero, and everyone in between thought that Omar Sharif looked a lot cuter without the beret. Recently, though, Sharif added a footnote to the movie's ignominious history when he issued a press statement saying that of all the roles he had played, it was the one that he most deeply regretted, and declaring that the CIA "was behind this film. I only knew later how they manipulated the truth." To the best of our knowledge, the CIA has issued no comment on Sharif's charges, maybe because they're working their way through their list of things they have to apologize for in chronological order and haven't gotten to 1969 yet. But if Benecio del Toro ever gets an offer to don some long plastic whiskers and star in the new musical Osama!, alongside Zac Efron as Ayman al-Zawahiri, you'll know that your tax dollars are still being put to good use.