Cangaceiro

Our old stand-bys, good and evil, battle it out at the Brattle again, this time not in the usual French, but in Portuguese. Being Brazilian, Cangaceiro's bandit villains are a motley compound of both cowboy and Indian, which makes them, as usual, much more interesting than the somewhat insipid "good guys."

The indio-cowboys have a fantastic and savage leader in Captain Galdino Ferreira, a sort of jungle-boy Long John Silver, who can do without money, but not without violence. So the Cangaceiros have plenty of violence, most of it superfluous and therefore especially appealing. The good folk have a fairly hard time of it; in fact, they are almost invariably killed, or branded. And to heap indignity upon extinction, they are not even allowed the social graces of the Cangaceiros, who are tricked out in the fanciest rigs since Desiree (Napoleonic pampa hats and costume, bejeweled cartridge belts) and who have a neat back-in-the-saddle song which, fortunately, they sing quite a bit.

The few "virtuous" parts of Cangaceiro, however, are slightly awful--hero and heroine participate in a series of love scenes which are pretty much the limit in cowboy-jungle romance. They are also not very brief. The Tarzan type, Teodoro, comes out with some dialogue which, even in Portuguese, cannot fail to win this year's U.T. Award for Unlikelihood. The man protests that "his blood is mingled with the earth" and that earth and woman are the same thing ergo he cannot possibly marry the heroine. The argument is somewhat unconvincing, but one can't blame him--a woman was never made of colder marble.

The "good" people can be endured only by hardened John Wayne addicts or by people with a vigorous sense of humor. But the demonic Captain Galdino is one of the great Manichaean figures of the year. And if the cowboy romance is hard to take, it's great fun to see those crazy Latins laughing and singing and killing people.