Screen

...It is an extraordinarily precise gesture, a ritual gesture, for the brim of the hat is already perfectly shaped, and he is careful to touch it only lightly so he won't disturb that perfection...

...Its portrayal of thirties' pop culture, intended as a pastiche, ends up a hodgepodge instead...

...As the main defendant in the movie's version of this murder trial, Henry represents many of the real defendants of forty years ago rolled into one...

...Compared to Zoot Suit, it's a cold fish of a movie, a wooden nickel...

...There is a war oh, and El Pachuco's pants are bloused and wrapped tight at the ankle above shiny, black, knob-toed shoes, as if he were a parody of paratrooper...

...When one of them was found dead after a rumble at a city reservoir called Sleepy Lagoon, six-hundred others were rounded up indiscriminately by the police, twenty-two went on trial, and twelve were eventually found guilty despite the absence of any witnesses...

...Henry becomes someone courageous and pure of heart, the hero of a propaganda play...

...To bring that play to the screen, Valdez has filmed a performance of the play itself...

...Worn with suspenders, the pants have a high waist from which a yard of key chain dangles, snaking its way down one side of his leg, up the other, and into his pocket...

...By incarnating Henry's most cynical and violent urges in El Pachuco, playwright Luis Valdez has freed Henry himself from those urges...

...Henry is not exactly real, either...

...This outfit is the zoot suit of legend, the original "zoot suit with a drape shape.'' The drape of the jacket is everything...

...You're the one who got me here-you're me, my best friend and my worst enemy, myself...

...He fingers the hat brim as if looking "sharp" meant being, literally, sharp as a switchblade...

...I went just for the music, and the clothes...

...They are what bring the legend of El Pachuco to life...

...His method of doing so is often ingenious in spite of, or maybe because of, a very limited budget (a few million dollars...

...IF YOU WANT to see how little entertainment value there is in mere technical excellence, look at Pennies from Heaven, with its elaborately produced musical fantasies and expensive Hollywood treatments...

...He is in his posture and his cool arrogance the first of the "laid-back" Californians...

...The collar on his shirt tapers to long, narrow points like two bloody stiletto blades...

...There's enough fabric left over in the pleats to make the parachute...

...He always handles himself as if he were dangerous, even to himself...

...Henry is merely a character who carries on the struggle...

...So says El Pachuco (Edward James Olmos), and he ought to know, since he's the very embodiment of that myth...

...This isn't strictly true, however...

...When worn by El Pachuco, red and black may be the colors of revolution and anarchy...

...As El Pachuco moves among the dancers bouncing and bopping to "Los Ckucos Suaves," or to the Andrews Sisters' "Zoot Suit for My Sunday Gal," he leans back to let the coat hang free from his body like drapery from a statue of a god...

...but they are also the colors of La Raza, Cesar Chavez's drive to unionize farmworkers in southern California back in the 1960s...

...To wear the zoot suit is, El Pachuco tells us, "to be sharp as a diamond...

...They are what all the money invested in a film like Pennies can't buy, or replace...

...The one thing Zoot Suit has going for it, however flawed it may be, is that Valdez has made his play out of his own experience and his passion...

...As he says this, he smooths the lavish brim of his black fedora...

...But these faults are hardly crucial...

...Zoot Suit was originally produced as a play at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles...

...From the depths of his despair in prison, Henry calls out to the phantom, "I know who you are, carnal...

...Like the character of Henry, the technical quality of the film is a little crude and one-dimensional...

...Everything about his clothes is out-sized, over-size, larger than life...

...It was the secret fantasy of every bato to put on a zoot suit and play the myth...

...He is, in fact, a rather ethereal type, a spiritual presence rather than a real person, the alter-ego of the film's hero, Henry Reyna (Daniel Valdez...

...Every move is studied, calculated, As he sits at the piano singing about his two favorite ninas, "Marie" and "Juana," in "Marijuana Boogie," he clenches the reefer between his teeth with impeccable menace...

...The year is 1942...

...With its wing-pad shoulders, extravagant lapels, and flaring skirts that reach almost to the knee, a zoot jacket cannot just be worn...

...The film acknowledges the quality of combination in his role when it attributes numerous different fates to him after his release from prison, on appeal, following the 1943 "zoot suit riots...

...I admit that it is Sometimes a poorly made movie, particularly in the recording of the first few scenes and in a tendency to frame the dance sequences too high...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...but he is more real, being a composite of some young Chicanos who actually lived in Los Angeles in the early 1940s...

...Bato means dude, and when a bato is on the dance floor jumping and jiving, he swings his key chain with one hand in a gesture that is half way between a cowboy spinning a lariat and a street fighter brandishing a skid chain...

...You have to know how to wear it, to strike the right pose that will show it off...

...Valdez has managed to give his play the look and feel of a movie...

...El Pachuco is not the only character in Zoot Suit, but he is the heart and soul of it, especially the soul...

...In 1965, Luis Valdez joined Chavez's movement and founded El Teatro Campesino, a theater troupe whose performances rallied support for the cause...

...He wears a red, open-collared shirt under a black zoot suit...

...The relationship between Henry and El Pachuco is a complex one...

...He himself dresses in red and black, the colors of revolution and anarchy...