From Valentino to Disney: Global Gauchos in 1920s Hollywood Cinema

Abstract

Between 1921 and 1930, fourteen gaucho films were made in Hollywood. Framing these works within the dynamic interactions of the “national” and the “trans-national”, “international”, and “global” in cinema and literature, this article explores how Hollywood projected globally a repertoire of themes from criollista culture, presenting an exoticised vision of Argentine national identity as an uncorrupted version of the American myth of the Old West. The analysis principally focuses on The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), a film adaptation of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s 1916 Spanish- language novel in which Rodolfo Valentino dresses as a gaucho and dances the tango, and Douglas Fairbanks as The Gaucho (1927), where an emblematic Hollywood actor plays a gaucho character. Finally, the article traces the indelible mark that these movies left in the following decades both locally and globally, insofar as their contents were reappropriated by Argentine culture, reshaping the way Argentines perceived their nation, and they predated the “Good Neighbor Policy” films of the 1930s and 1940s.