Please Rewind Talent Wall

Alfonso Arau

Born in Mexico City on January 11, 1932, Alfonso Arau has built a wide-ranging career as an actor, director, screenwriter and producer. His work crosses Mexican and American film and television, with character roles that often place him among bandits, smugglers, businessmen and other figures capable of unsettling a story—or steering it toward comedy. Arau appeared as Captain Herrera, a lieutenant serving General Mapache, in Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 western The Wild Bunch. He later played the shady businessman Manuel in Used Cars, smuggler Juan in Romancing the Stone and El Guapo, the chief bandit at the center of Three Amigos. Those films gave him room to move between menace and broad comedy without losing the force of his screen presence. His Mexican film work includes El rincón de las vírgenes, a 1972 story set in rural Mexico during the 1920s. Arau played the assistant to a traveling fake mystical doctor whose past journeys are recalled when local women propose that the doctor be made a saint. Arau also acted in and directed the 1973 film Calzónzin Inspector, based on a character from Rius’s comic Los Supermachos. Influenced by Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector, the film follows two men mistaken for government inspectors by a corrupt small-town mayor. Its comedy served as pointed political criticism of Mexico’s then-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party and local political bosses during a period of restricted political speech. At least two versions exist, including one altered by state censors. On American television, Arau made numerous character appearances, including playing the bandit Mando in the 1972 Gunsmoke episode “Hidalgo.” His later directing work includes the 2010 Italian-language film The Trick in the Sheet. In December 2004, the Santa Fe Film Festival honored him for his work in cinema. Taken together, his career reflects a performer and filmmaker comfortable shifting between satire, westerns, adventure and comedy.