Pure pulp, low budget, low class, and highly entertaining. It’s so kinetic, it feels like the camera’s about to careen into a wall. Director/writer/editor/cameraman Robert Rodriguez, 23 years old and of modest means at the time (he raised some of the film’s $7,000 budget by being a test subject for medical research!), originally made it with hopes of merely cracking the Spanish-language straight-to-video market. Due to some supremely lucky breaks, the film got the attention of Columbia Pictures who bought it and put it on the arthouse circuit, where it became a hit.
What’s so special about it? Aside from being a fast-paced good time with some nearly documentary views of a rundown Mexican town, El Mariachi is also a sly screwball comedy. It’s the classic “mistaken identity” story. Our hero (Carlos Gallardo) is no man of action. He’s a sensitive musician, down and out and broke as a joke. He wanders the dusty Mexican highways, with guitar case in hand, and relates to the turtles who crawl past. He reaches a town where he thinks he might find work singing love ballads in bars, but NOPE. It so happens that the local crimelord is on the lookout for an assassin whose trademark is a guitar case full of guns. Next thing you know, our sweet mariachi is dodging bullets because every thug in town thinks he’s a killer.
There are at least five old Bob Hope movies from the 1940s with a similar premise.
Rodriguez wisely plays up the humor and it’s easy to see why Hollywood scooped him up, despite the film’s micro-budget grease and grime. He’s not fully developed yet, but Rodriguez bears all the earmarks here of a guy who can please a crowd. He can give you laughs in one scene, breakneck action in the next scene, and even sneak in a halfway-believable little love story in the middle of it all.
The film survives the years as one of the frothiest classics of the 90s independent film boom.