Aristocratic Englishman William Walker (Marlon Brando) is sent on a secret mission to the Caribbean island of Queimada, where the Portuguese have established a highly profitable sugar cane plantation labored by thousands of black slaves. Once on Queimada, Walker befriends Jose Dolores
(Evaristo Marquez), a powerful black stevedore. Walker instills in Dolores a revolutionary fervor, prompts him to rob a bank, and transforms him into an outlaw hero. After enlisting the aid of Teddy Sanchez (Renato Salvatori), a hotel clerk with political aspirations, Walker ensures that Dolores
and his guerrilla followers overthrow the Portuguese. Under Walker's guidance, Sanchez assassinates the governor and takes control of the government with Dolores' blessing, permitting Walker to return to England secure in the knowledge that, with Sanchez in control, Queimada will accede to the
wishes of Walker's British merchant bosses. Ten years later, a drunken, disillusioned Walker is hired to return to the island to halt a Dolores-led revolution that has erupted in response to corruption in the Sanchez government.
Determined to work on a strong political film, Brando contacted Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo, whose brilliant BATTLE OF ALGIERS is one of the most powerful depictions of revolution ever filmed. The two men, eager to work with each other, chose as their subject matter the Spanish intervention
on the island of Queimada in the 1520s, when a slave uprising threatened sugar production. When the Spanish government protested the idea, the director simply changed the country in question to Portugal, enabling him to make a film showing the purity of revolution, the cruelty of colonialism, and
the inhumanity of slavery. In 1988's WALKER, director Alex Cox took a revisionist look at a somewhat similar situation in 19th-century Nicaragua, basing his story on a real-life American adventurer whose name also happened to be William Walker. leave a comment
