At one level, this film focuses on the much delayed coming of age adventure for Jane Fonda's character, Harriet Winslow, who suddenly decides she has had enough of her mother-dominated spinster school marm life. Yes, we would expect her to be maybe 10-20 years younger than Fonda's 50 years. However, her relatively advanced age makes her crush on Peck's 70 year old character, Ambrose Bierce, more believable. Peck's characterization of Bierce is somewhat at odds with what I have read of this man. We get the impression that, like Harriet, he has forsaken his bookish life, as a sick old man, for a final hands-on adventure, as an aid to the rebels of the Mexican revolution. However, the real Bierce fought in the Civil War and later crossed the continent on another mission. He was not a one-dimensional bookish writer, by experience.
Fonda simultaneously develops crushes on both Bierce and General Arroyo(Jimmy Smits). They are both seen as romantic rebels, though of very different sorts and for different reasons. Harriet reminds Bierce of his daughter, whom he hasn't seen for many years, while Bierce reminds Harriet of her father, who abandoned his domineering wife for a new love, and who fought in the Spanish American War to free Cuba. But after partially destroying the Miranda mansion, where he was conceived, Arroyo delays taking his troops to join Villa's, as ordered. Arroyo's bedding of Harriet on the very bed where he was conceived symbolically reverses the power relationship in which his european father raped his native american mother. He finds the original spanish land grant papers giving the land of this hacienda to the peasants. Since Spain no longer governed Mexico, these papers were not necessarily valid, as Bierce points out, but Arroyo refuses to heed. Arroyo's shootings of his favorite horse and of Bierce
emphasize his determination to stay at the hacienda instead of joining Villa.
There are several references accusing Arroyo of having become the new Miranda, and thus betraying the revolution. I don't understand why Arroyo had one of his soldiers shot for doing exactly what he was doing. He must have known he would receive the same sentence if he did not soon join Villa. Perhaps this symbolizes the near universal tendency of revolutionary leaders to gradually become tyrants as bad or worse than those they topple. So it had been with Porfirio Diaz, the once revolutionary general the revolutionists now fought against. So it would be with various successors to Diaz during these turbulent times.
This is an entertaining film, for the most part. There are enough action scenes to complement the philosophizing and other tamer scenes. You will have to pay close attention or see it several times to catch all the symbolism. I can see why this film was important to Jane Fonda. It is, in a sense, autobiographical, symbolizing her mid-life transformation from an apolitical sex kitten into an anti-establishment political spokeswoman for the powerless of the world.

I really enjoyed this movie I was really rooting for Jane Fonda and Jimmy Smitts charactors. The only problem I had (but still love this movie) was that I felt that Jane was a little to old to play this part, they could have found someone a little younger.

Taking place against the backdrop of the Mexican revolution, this movie fills an unusual niche in the filmography of the three main actors, none of whom have done anything like it before or since.

Peck plays Ambrose Bierce, a man whose personality was "...as flinty as the soil of his native New England..."--and probably then some. Although portrayed as cantakerous and feisty and even mean-spirited in the movie, Bierce apparently had a soft spot for the idea of a grass-roots Mexican revolution, and left the U.S. to throw his lot as well as his not inconsiderable reputation behind it.

After that, nothing is known about what became of Bierce, although the movie presents one theory about how he may have died, by getting involved with a tragic love triangle between a beautiful but estranged American woman (played by Jane Fonda), and a young Mexican general fighting for the revolution, played by Jimmy Smits. All the fireworks are certainly not all on the battlefield in this movie, and the tension between the three gradually but inexorably increases until the explosive climax. Overall, it's an unusual movie with fine performances by all three artists, and the only time that I know of that all three worked together.

Few movies are better than the book that contains the history that inspires them. Old Gringo is an example. Carlos Fuentes wrote Gringo Viejo and in my opinion, this is his more successful work; but Fuentes is lazy and some chapters of his books are unconnected. Nevertheless, the movie has a perfect rhythm. Each personage has an extraordinary evolution during the whole film.

There cannot be the slightest doubt: Gregory Peck was the perfect actor for to be Ambrose Bierce.

Gregory Peck, Jane Fonda, Jimmy Smits, are politically left of center. Their involvement in the filming of leftist novelist Carlos Fuentes' "Old Gringo" almost certainly expresses their own infatuation with radical politics. How tragic. This film is nothing more than a romanticization of a failure. Do you want to know why Mexico is today a poverty stricken nation? Why so many of its citizens desperately desire to escape to the United States? Much of this has to do with the murderous activities of Pancho Villa and other so-called revolutionaries in the early part of the twentieth Century. They left the Mexicans unable to form a viable government. The rule of law was rejected in favor of revolutionary dictators claiming to represent the wishes of the common folk. Gregory Peck portrays Ambrose Bierce who naively considered Villa to be another George Washington. What can I add concerning the infamous Ms. Fonda? She has, in real life, even praised Communism. In this particular role as Harriet Winslow, Fonda is far too old. Another reviewer correctly pointed out that she looks every bit of her fifty one years---and the part calls for a woman who is much younger. Fonda could literally be Jimmy Smits' (Gen. Tomas Arroyo) mother. I was unable to take seriously their romance.

Ambrose Bierce is trying to make sense of his long life before passing onto the great unknown. The spinster Harriet Winslow is an existential mess. She is a true believer type easily seduced by the utopian fantasies of a better world---which usually end up causing substantially more misery in the real one. Bierce is trying to get the trigger happy Arroyo to kill him. Will he succeed? Should we care? The answer: we should not.

David Thomson
Flares into Darkness.