In Old Arizona (1928)
That is what a thief comes to know—he cannot rub out his past. Ah, he may be able to get away from these people who hunt for him, but he can never get away from himself.
Do not fail—shoot quick and straight.
In Old Arizona 1928 - watched 7/6/24
Directors: Irving Cummings & Raoul Walsh
Writer: Tom Barry
Starring: Warner Baxter, Edmund Lowe, Dorothy Burgess
Available to watch on YouTube
First Time Watch? Yes
Welp—it’s happened. And it took longer than I thought it would, actually. We’ve come to a movie that’s done a full-blown racism.
When watching The Hollywood Revue of 1929, there were, let’s say, questionable themes in some of the songs, but thankfully the performances themselves veered away from using blackface. In Old Arizona, however, said “fuck it” to cultural sensitivity and “fuck it” to hiring non-white actors to play their leads. The Cisco Kid (played by Warner Baxter, who won an Academy Award for his performance) is of Portuguese descent, while Tonia Maria (Dorothy Burgess) is a Mexican woman. You can see that both actors are wearing makeup to darken their skin tones, and the effect is unsettling and distracting, to say the least.
Now. It would be very easy for me to watch this movie, observe the brownface, and simply excuse it as being “of a certain time.” I don’t particularly want to do that, though. It’s a tired excuse, and giving the filmmakers a pass just because of the time period in which they made the movie sends the message that there are conditions in which this is acceptable. And we (especially us white people) need to start saying no, dammit, this was actually never okay! And suggesting that it ever was okay or, at least, excusable, opens the door to excusing racist, whitewashed casting in modern films.
I mean, it wasn’t that long ago that Emma Stone was cast as a half-Asian, half-Hawaiian woman! An executive once allegedly suggested that Julia Roberts should have played Harriet Tubman! This list of whitewashed roles in Hollywood on Wikipedia that will probably make you really mad has a couple entries from as recent as 2023! This is not an old problem, it’s an ongoing one—non-white actors and creatives still have a harder time getting roles and having their projects made, and it’s not for lack of talent. Executives are still disproportionally white and male. Directors are still disproportionally white and male. Good roles for actors are still, you guessed it, white and male.
All this is to say that when this happens (and I’m confident it will happen again over the course of this project), I’m not going to excuse it or ignore it, and I’m not going to “contextualize” it because, lol, fuck contextualizing racism. I realize this probably sounds extremely white savior-y of me, I own that, but this is something I couldn’t exactly avoid talking about.
This gun, he liable to bark many, many times.
We start In Old Arizona in, well, old Arizona. There’s sort of an odd scene where an annoying woman boards a stagecoach headed for Gallup, New Mexico. During the journey, we meet The Cisco Kid (Warner Baxter), a notorious bandit who robs the stagecoach. Word spreads about the robbery, and Sergeant Micky Dunn (Edmund Lowe) makes it his mission to catch the Cisco Kid, dead or alive, for a $5,000 reward.1
The Cisco Kid arrives in town, fresh off the success of his robbery, and meets Dunn in a barber shop. Dunn, stupidly, doesn’t realize that he’s face-to-face with the Cisco Kid, instead just assuming this guy is just a friendly, loquacious stranger. Once the Cisco Kid is long gone from the barber shop, Dunn learns from a local blacksmith that that feller was, indeed, the Cisco Kid he was looking for. Brilliant. Way to go, Sergeant. Hey, man… I feel like if you’re trying to track a guy down, you should probably know what he looks like?
So the Cisco Kid evades the cops extremely easily, and goes to visit his girlfriend, Tonia Maria. Tonia Maria is a little liar and a schemer who cheats on the Cisco Kid often. Tonia Maria eventually meets Dunn, and they have an affair. Dunn tells Tonia Maria of his plan to catch the Cisco Kid for the $5,000 reward, which he promises to give to her. This makes Tonia Maria super horny, and they express their love for each other, which the Cisco Kid conveniently overhears.
Tonia Maria writes a secret letter to Dunn, telling him that the Cisco Kid is going to ride off later that night—she instructs him to come that same night in order to finally take the Cisco Kid down. The Cisco Kid finds the letter first, though, and he replaces it with a letter of his own, as Tonia Maria, telling Dunn that he will be disguised in Tonia Maria’s clothes that night in order to escape. He also writes that Tonia Maria will be wearing his clothes, which doesn’t really make sense, But it fools Dumb Dunn well enough to allow the Cisco Kid to escape later that night.
When Tonia Maria steps out of the house, Dunn shoots her, believing her to be the Cisco Kid in disguise. It’s left fairly ambiguous as to whether or not Tonia Maria survives, but the Cisco Kid doesn’t really give a shit—after hearing the gunshots from a distance, he delivers what has become maybe one of my favorite lines from any movie ever: “Her flirting days are over. And she’s ready to settle down.” Truly, what an incredible way to react to your longtime girlfriend’s possible demise!
Anybody can make a mistake—that's why they have rubbers on lead pencils.
The western genre is not one I’m super familiar with—I could probably count the number of true westerns I’ve seen on one, maybe one and a half hands. Look, I swear I have a diverse film palate, it just so happens that gangster movies and westerns, the genres that take up a lot of space in early cinema, aren’t genres that have ever interested me a whole lot! They’re very “dudes rock,” and that’d never been my vibe, but… I’m trying. I’m committed to broadening my horizons—I even went to see the first installment of Horizon, Kevin Costner’s unhinged western epic passion project, the first chapter of which is three hours long and had one of the most laughable sex scenes I’ve ever witnessed in my entire life. You can’t tell me I’m not putting in the effort!!
But, man, In Old Arizona doesn’t do the western genre any favors. It’s largely pretty boring, lacking in action. Everything transpires through weird, overacted dialogue that made me laugh for the wrong reasons. A sampling of said dialogue:
-Say, do you know that eggs cost 15 cents a dozen?
-Do you have to buy 'em?
-Well, what do you want me to do? Lay 'em?
-Ha ha — you can’t do that.
That last line is delivered exactly as flat as it’s written out. At times In Old Arizona reaches The Room-levels of bad dialogue, which does kind of rule.
Otherwise, this movie was really just a stinker, all around. The brownface and the terrible accents the two main actors use are already unforgivable, but even if you were to set that aside (please don’t), there wasn’t much about the story that excited or interested me. Based on the plot, you would think that there would be more suspense, more intrigue, more of a cat-and-mouse situation, but there was none of that. I feel like a western, if nothing else, shouldn’t be boring! Give me shootouts, give me bank robberies, give me some fast freakin’ galloping horses, give me ladies in immaculately designed corsets showing off their legs in a saloon, give me something! Hell, a story about a bandit and his slutty girlfriend really shouldn’t be such a snoozer!
At least I can be grateful for the fact that this one racist western doesn’t leave me with any complicated feelings. I don’t have to argue its merits “in spite of” its flaws. It’s simply flawed all around—and I’m at peace with that. 😌
Her flirting days are over. And she's ready to settle down.
Quick Facts:
Nominated for 5 Academy Awards, won one (Best Actor)
First feature film with sound to be filmed outdoors
Co-director Raoul Walsh was set to star as the Cisco Kid, but after a car accident that eventually cost him his eye, he was recast. He still appears in some scenes that were shot before his accident.
My Rating: ⭐½
Next Up: The Broadway Melody (1929)
$5,000 in 1928, by the way, was equivalent to $91,410 in 2024 dollars. And $5,000 in 1897, roughly when the film is set, is equivalent to $195,316.54 in 2024. Yowza!!!