To make a feature-length movie for $7,000—pocket change by Hollywood’s inflated standards—is a real achievement. But to make a good movie, one that favorably compares to the slick, big-budget studio blockbusters, for such a pittance is close to a miracle. In 1993 (or 1992, as reports vary), then novice director Robert Rodriguez wowed the Sundance Film Festival crowd with his ultra low-budget shoot’em-up El Mariachi, a fast and funny pastiche of spaghetti-western and lurid crime-drama conventions. A one-man production crew who wrote, directed, produced, edited, and shot El Mariachi, Rodriguez was warmly embraced by aspiring filmmakers for his cheerful, pragmatic approach to what he called guerrilla film making: make it dirt cheap and have fun.
Set in a dusty, sun-bleached Mexican town ruled by the drug dealer Moco , El Mariachi follows the simplest of narratives. A poor, itinerant musician clad in black and carrying a guitar case, El Mariachi is mistaken for Moco’s sworn enemy, the ruthless assassin Azul. Unaware of the mix-up, El Mariachi is cornered by Moco’s trigger-happy thugs at his fleabag motel. By sheer luck, El Mariachi turns the tables on his heavily armed attackers and kills four of them in a shoot-out. With the pretty bar owner Domino his only ally, El Mariachi attempts to clear up this dangerous case of mistaken identity as the body count skyrockets. Bloody confusion reigns, however, once the real Azul arrives to settle an old score with Moco.
Mythic pulp has its allure, and it also has its limitations. El Mariachi displays no real emotion except a profound appreciation for the genre film making that has inspired it, and a delight in manipulating the elements of such stories. Rodriguez’s own characters are so thin that the film’s biggest surprise comes in its final moments, when the Mariachi makes the leap to a different dimension and becomes an original creation. Much of the time, this film maker holds his audience’s interest with incidental touches, like the one-man mariachi band whose electronic keyboard seems to play only polkas. Rodriguez observes the cardinal rule of making sure his viewers never have the chance to grow bored.
Some of El Mariachi concentrates, with enjoyable self-consciousness, on aggrandizing the Mariachi’s image. “What happened to the days when guitarists were gods?” he asks mournfully, even as the film prepares to reinvent him as another kind of deity. “One thing I know is that he’ll always dress in black and carry a guitar case,” someone says of the Mariachi. “It’s his style.”
An homage to the spare, violent westerns of Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah, El Mariachi has a goofy, tongue-in-cheek humor all its own. The violence is stylized and patently unrealistic—Rodriguez would end up pushing it even further over the top in Desperado, which star Antonio Banderas accurately describes as “action magical realism,” and is ultimately a remake of El Mariachi, except made with more money. While technically crude, El Mariachi has been made with such unbridled enthusiasm and obvious love of movies that it’s easy to forgive the film’s occasional lapses in narrative logic or plausibility. A bona-fide pulp stylist like his good buddy Quentin Tarantino (who wrote and co-starred in Rodriguez’s campy vampire thriller From Dusk Till Dawn) Rodriguez also draws surprisingly decent performances from his cast of amateurs, many of whom were locals the enterprising filmmaker hired simply because they were there. Talk about serendipity! Although Banderas is now most closely identified with the iconic role, Carlos Gallardo is appropriately heroic as the original El Mariachi. He handles both the action scenes and romantic moments with an ease that belies his inexperience.
At the film’s end, the Mariachi makes his own declaration, armed with the few remaining souvenirs of his bleak adventure. “I’m prepared for the future,” says this character, who was conceived as the hero of a trilogy and is indeed all set for subsequent adventures. It goes without saying that when Robert Rodriguez made this movie as his debut, he was easily prepared for a big future of his own.