Once Again The Legend-Slayer Cometh-This Time In Old Mexico-A Retort To Si Lannon’s Film Review Of “The Mark Of Zorro-A Commentary  

By Will Bradley

If this legend-slaying that I have been asked to perform ever since I debunked the modern legend of one Sherlock Holmes, real name Lawrence Livermore, in battle with old time film reviewer Seth Garth who while as wary of the “fake news” legend of Mr. Livermore as I was, nevertheless got caught up in some semi-homophobic weirdo scene trying to debunk the legend via his and Doc Watson, assumed real name although the name Nigel Bruce has been bandied about of late, membership in the Homintern and their being the masterminds behind all the troubles in Merry Olde England running guns and everything else out of Baker Street and at the Black Swan Tavern on the docks. Thus I got this assignment almost by default since site manager Greg Green now is very aware that anytime some stumblebum legend comes across his desk in film or book form I am the go-to person to utterly destroy whatever nonsense is afoot. (I will also take a shot at art but feel less confident there since the poor buggers who work that trade really believe these legends and spent a ton of time putting paint or chalk to canvas)  

My credentials for today’s debunking of poor deluded Si Lannon’s review of his childhood hero, a guy, a Spanish guy but not from Spain but out in the wilds of California back in the 1800s named Zorro are starting to pile up. The occasion this time a paean to one Zorro, no known last name portrayed in the 1998 film The Mask of Zorro and played by either Anthony Hopkins whom I thought had died years ago from withered old age and hubris or Antonio Banderas, take your pick since it is the legend I am smashing not the actors or plot-line of the greedy producers. We live in a funny age, an age where on the one hand a lot of people will believe anything that comes on the television spewed by any dingbat with time on his or her hands and on the other everything has to be dissected by some authority, some college deadbeat who just happened to specialize in whatever the flavor of the month subject was afloat.

Therefore I am duty-bound to present my credentials since at this publication we have since lovely Greg Green arrived to head the day to day operations bent toward that latter practice mentioned above. I have already mentioned my documented (and wearisome having to wade through twelve or was fourteen Holmes films) debunking of the British parlor pink amateur private detective formerly known as Sherlock Holmes and now fully exposed as a guy named Livermore, then recently escaped from Darthmoor Prison. In a way that was kids’ stuff since I was dueling Seth Garth who had I admit had some insights into the psycho world of Holmes and his crowd. On my own though I was able to sniff out the rancorous fake legend of one Johnny Cielo who supposedly was a nearly legendary aviator when that profession meant danger and short lives. Turned out this half-baked junkie was making his stuff up as he went along and some desperate newspaperman down in Miami was gullible enough to believe he had screen siren Rita Hayworth in one arm and guns for Fidel Castro out in the hills of Cuba in the other. (That Rita tag not a hard thing to see guys would lie about since she really was a looker as they used to say even to a twenties something guy.)        

A couple of major coups were ripping the mask off of Robin Hood and his so-called band of Merry Men, really nothing but highway robbers and drunken sots who had the “rep” of robbing the rich and giving to the poor. Bullshit and as hard as it was since the documentation I needed was from church and estate files going back to the 12^th century I proved the guy was among the greediest guys in the English realm especially when his sponsor Richard the Lion-Hearted got back from the crusades and gave him whatever he wanted. Smashed like a ripe pumpkin. The other major one and I will stop there since I am started to get heated up about this clown Zorro was the so-called king of love then and leave them, another Spanish dude except this guy actually in Spain, for a while anyway until they deported him or he put himself in exile after disgracing himself before a lot of young virginal convent girls who were suffering from enclosure hysteria and hormonal imbalance and made the whole thing up and created a hell of a lot of work for the Inquisition before some Maria something confessed that she was in heat, something like that.

Look, if you read Si Lannon’s review you could hardly keep a dry eye when he explained that his own precious mother was not the Italian of the neighborhood acceptable ethnic group (if just barely in the Irish Town Acre) but Spanish, Mexican and was keeping that “on the low.” Nobody, no reasonable person could fault him for a certain adult pride in his heritage. He will get no argument from me on that score but what brings me to the boiling point and fast is his cringing fawning of this dead-beat bracero with no last name, and as far as I could discover no address, in California or Mexico. In the early 1800s after Mexico righteously kicked dear mother, madre Spain out of its lands there was still plenty of work to be done. The poor landless peasants were land hungry (hell they still are today to no avail with the decimations of globalization and bum treaties like that old NAFTA rape) and were getting nothing but dust and arroyos. Anybody could have come along and gone with that eternal gag- steal from the rich give to the poor and found a receptive audience. Robin Hood got away with it for centuries before I exposed the bloody bastard for the fake he was.

This Zorro business was of the same cloth, tattered cloth. This guy, this Senor Rios, or whatever moniker he was using depending on what part of California he was working started wearing black, all black and talking tough to the coppers when those land hungry peasants were around. Started calling himself Zorro, the chosen one. Here is his gag though, or part of it. He worked these peasants into a lather, told them he would get land grants and whatever else they were clamoring for but he needed money to raise an army to fight the greedy Dons who did own everything including those braceros. They forked up, forked up plenty and off he went. Friends, one of the great things about breaking up the more modern legends is that there is a paper trail, especially among the Spanish churchman (remember they were the cadre for the Inquisition in an earlier time). A paper trail not easily findable in the Robin Hood and Don Juan cases. After exhaustive study and research I can report that those poor benighted peasants were once again gulled by a passing grifter- a guy named Zorro who never even existed. That Senor Rios on the other hand became one of the wealthiest landowners in California before the Republic. I will put my knife back in my sheath for any day now that I have done what I needed to do.