Desert Island Movies
Uncut Magazine

By Jo Francis
November 2000

Currently starring in Snatch, Benicio Del Toro talks about his favourite films

It'd be a silent movie. I'm not kidding! Yeah, I like silent movies. Y' know, there are the obvious ones like Greed (Erich Von Stroheim, 1925), and Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) ... but I really like Mother (1926) by Pudovkin, a Russian contempory of Eisenstein. It's based on on a story by Maxim Gorky. Pudovkin started all these montage experiments, like intercutting a shot of a bowl of food with a shot of a coffin, to screw your emotions. In Mother, you get all these revolutionary marchers mixed in with shots of an ice flow cracking up. He was the king of montage, although lots of people say that was Eisenstein with Battleship Potemkin and the others.

Story is the key thing me though y' know. Cinema is story-telling. In some ways, being Latin-American - I was born in Puerto Rico, part italian, part spanish - well, whatever, but I'm more interested in human beings than in Superman or Dracula. I love cinema y' know. I didn't know anything about it before I was involved, I've never studied it. But I guess it's like the literature of the 21st century in a way. There's so much down there in silent cinema, back in that world, that, y' know, I feel I'm learning quite a bit when I see it. And I really enjoy it, too.

Mother is about a Russian woman whose husband and son take up on opposite sides in a workers' strike. The son's with the workers but his father's blackmailed into supporting the bosses and blacklegs. There's a lot of grief, sure. In the end, she risks everything by standing up to the police and the Cossacks and putting herself and her son in danger. The family get torn apart. They're all strong characters. It's set in, like, 1905. It's a great, great Russian silent film.

Oh, and Tod Browning! Man! I mean - he's really the beginning of surrealism in a way. Freaks (1933) has sound, yeah, but the silent stuff that he did before, with Lon Chaney and Joseph Farnham, is like mindblowing. Y' know he ran away from home to join the circus himself when he was a kid? Then he was an actor and he was in DW Griffith's Intolerance?

Anyway, he wrote all these stories and Chaney looked amazing and weird in them. In The Unknown, he was this guy who had his arms cut off because Joan Crawford didn't want him to touch her! They made all these wild horror movies together. There's The Unholy Three, which is funny and tragic. Then Freaks had that fantastic tagline: 'Can a full-grown woman truly love a MIDGET??' Ha! Incredible. It's like an attack on all the pretty people. And y' know what? It wouldn't get made today, cos it wouldn't be pretty enough."

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