Paricutin therefore stood in for Popocatepetl. The latter volcano was six times as high, but in a movie who would be able to tell? The town of Uruapan del Progreso, situated near the Paricutin lava beds about 300 miles from Morelia, became the second location. Before the film crew arrived, 400 men had worked for two months constructing a towering Aztec pyramid, 60 huts of various kinds, and a graveyard with 75 wooden crosses. The company then worked at the location for five weeks.
Paricutin was usually cooperative, ushering forth tremendous black clouds into the sky to create a dramatic background for the action. Sometimes, however, the dense "smoke" (actually steam and ash) blotted out the location's sunlight. King and Clarke cleverly took advantage of these times to make night scenes. Power spent Sundays flying members of the company over the gaping crater.
Curiously enough, King elected to film the numerous interiors in the temples and huts on location rather than at the studio. He had done this successfully before, most notably in 1930 when he filmed Hell Harbor in its entirety in the Florida Keys. Clarke was plagued by the difficulties of lighting inside the claustrophobic temples. The intense heat caused by the heavy light units necessary for Technicolor photography made these scenes a trial for everybody. One highly dramatic "night" scene was achieved ingeniously in daylight. This shows Fray Bartolome (Gomez) praying in his hut when the former Indian slave, Coatl (Jay Silverheels) steals in and whispers that it was he who murdered de Silva. "I put a 10' by 12' blue gel outside the entrance to diffuse the sun's rays and create the illusion of moonlight," Clarke later explained.
The film's most spectacular scenes were filmed at Uruapan, with the participation of 4,000 Indian extras in full Aztec regalia. The method of distributing costumes and weapons had been planned well in advance. The prop and wardrobe people began preparation before dawn, working by candlelight. The Aztec breech cloths had been made in five colors: white, red, yellow, green and brown. The extras were divided into five groups of 800, each of which was assigned a different color. Members of each group filed past in turn, and were issued matching shields and lances. In three hours, all were ready to perform the scenes of Montezuma's troops moving to challenge the conquistadores. Fill light was provided by long banks of reflectors, and the camera dolly followed the Aztec marchers on very long tracks.
The last major location was the coastal resort city of Acapulco, where the scenes at Cortez' first New World headquarters were filmed. This included most of the romantic sequences with Pedro and Catana. Power himself piloted several flights to the site, carrying 50 key members of the company while the others traveled by land.
Ironically, Clarke found the area's exceptional beauty somewhat problematic. "We thought of the picture as a sort of historical docu-mentary, so we kept the photography realistic," Clarke said. "Our approach had to be active, inasmuch as our story was one of action, which demanded that the camera be panning and moving most of the time. The camera was seldom still to permit compositional shots. We were careful not to glorify scenes just for the sake of pictorial beauty." In Acapulco, Clarke made his favorite "beauty shot" of the expedition, the climax of a sequence in which Pedro talks with Father Bartolome on a rocky beach. "The timing was arranged for a beautiful pictorial effect by shooting the last scene just at sunset."
As so often happens with pictures that require extensive location work, with all the vagaries of weather and other unexpected complications, Captain from Castile went over budget. Its 80-day shooting schedule stretched to 112 days as costs swelled to $4.5 million.
The finished production offered the customers their money's worth. Rightly advertised as a spectacular adventure of epic proportions, the picture is filled with almost non-stop action. It chills the blood with the menacing atmosphere and the (mostly offscreen) horrors of the Inquisition, and provides eye-filling pageantry, horseback chases, romance, fights on land and sea, revenge and mystery. It also delivers a stirring musical score by Alfred Newman, head of Fox's music department and considered by many musicians to have been the finest composer and conductor in films. Much of the score has been recorded several times, and the rousing triumphal march, titled "Conquest," has become part of the symphonic repertoire.
Unfortunately, the year of Captain from Castile's release 1948 was one in which the American movie industry was suffering a multitude of debilitating crises. The government was pressing demands that production companies divest themselves of their theater interests a near-death blow to theater chain companies like Fox, RKO, MGM and Paramount. The British Board of Trade almost doubled its quota law to require that 45 percent of features shown in English theaters had to be English-made, and slapped an ad valorem tax on imported films that let Britain keep 75 percent of American earnings. Many foreign markets were cut off altogether, and more than $50 million in American film industry funds were frozen in various nations. Many local governments suddenly discovered the joy of levying amusement taxes on theaters. It was also the year of the "Red Hunt" by the House Un-American Activities Committee headed by Rep. J. Parnell Thomas. So-called "costume" pictures fell out of favor at the time, so much so that Columbia called back its posters on The Loves of Carmen and replaced them with new art depicting Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford in modern dress. Meanwhile, the infant television industry suddenly began to make an impact on theater attendance, with many former moviegoers staying home nights, their eyes focused on fuzzy black-and-white images on six-inch screens.
With these and other problems bedeviling the industry in a single, catastrophic year, gross box-office receipts in the U.S. dropped 25 percent. Even so, Captain from Castile brought in a lot of money, but failed to recoup its cost. At a time when domestic receipts were all that really mattered, the average nationwide admission price was 35 cents for adults and a dime for children under 12. One fact was inescapable: there was no way that a $4.5 million movie could turn a profit in 1948.
Charles Clarke believed that the picture itself suffered the fatal flaw of being less effective than it could have been due to premature cessation of the story. "It was a magnificent production with plenty of exciting scenes," he allowed, "but I was always unhappy with it because the picture ended before it reached the climax it was building to: the conquest of Mexico City. We didn't really get to finish the picture."
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