One expression that has always appeared to me to hold an endless chasm of potential understanding within itself is when people say “art is where you find it”. Where this applies for me in terms of films is how two different people can view the same film and leave the theater and come away with totally different takes on what they just saw. Art films with themes of peaceful self-discovery and introspection may appear boring to the Blue-collar masses, Popular everyday movies with explosions and big tits may seem vacuous to film snobs. I used to work in a Blockbuster Video store in the 1990s and had a roommate at the time that I would supply with free new movies for him to watch. He was more of an action movie guy, so leaving him one afternoon with a copy of “Angels and Insects” went over like I had left him a copy of an Erica Jung novel. “That shit was weird, Man” my roommate from New Jersey declared, “That shit was whack, it should have been called ‘Angels and Incest’. You should get us some good shit to watch next time, like ‘Blood In, Blood Out’”. I had honestly never heard of “Blood In, Blood Out”. I saw the copy of it sitting on the shelves at the video store all the time, it was listed as being released in 1993, I had never ever heard of it.
Looking at the cover box for the movie at the video store, I discovered that it had been directed by Taylor Hackford, who I had heard of. Hackford two years after this movie directed the brilliant adaptation of Stephen King’s “Delores Claiborne” (Which I will be getting to on this blog at a later date). This film, “Blood In, Blood Out” is a fucking saga; a running time of three hours and ten minutes, like “The Godfather” with burritos, Quinceaneras and Mariachi bands. It would take too long to explain the intricacies of the plot, it’s better in this instance to describe the stars, tone, flow and it’s gritty based-on-someone’s-life realism. The film is simultaneously nihilistically dark and inspirational, if that can be a thing. The feelings in and of this film are of more importance than the details. While it’s subject matter, the intertwined lives of three Americans of Latin American roots, is not normally told in such long-winded and grandiose fashion, the film never moves it’s action beyond the streets of East Los Angeles and the inside of San Quentin prison. This is not a sweeping epic, but is a heavy handed (at times) yet jarring portrayal of what it is to grow up poor and Latino in Los Angeles in the 1970’s and 1980’s. While the film is structured more like a Mexicanized Warner Brothers crime melodrama, complete with overly dramatized music by film composer Bill Conti and events that are telegraphed by the film’s script and Director Hackford’s sense of pacing, “Blood In , Blood Out” creates it’s own aura eventually.
Much like Raoul Walsh’s “The Roaring Twenties” (reviewed earlier in this blog), “Blood In, Blood Out” centers around three young Americans, who in this case happen to be Hispanic teenagers in the early 1970’s. The first is Miklo, played by Damian Chapa, who’s lighter skin is an issue throughout the film, this character becomes a hardened life-long criminal. The second is Cruz, a heroin-addicted tortured artist played by Jessie Borrego and the third is Paco, an adrenaline junkie who eventually becomes a cop, played by Benjamin Bratt. Bratt is quite young in this and gives a dynamite performance as the young Gang member who turns into a Marine and then an undercover cop. This film at times seems like it was initially meant for TV or for Cable as a mini-series in terms of some of it’s formatting.
The first section of the film (The film seems to carry 5 distinct sections) is the beginning of the story in the Barrios of East Los Angeles in 1972; three young Hispanic males hanging out together, partying together and talking about their dreams together, finally make a pact to never turn their backs on each other, to live as Brothers who will always be loyal to each other. The film portrays Urban Los Angeles in the 1970’s to be a place of territories, blurrily defined boundaries of neighborhoods, patrolled (not that anyone asked them to) by young, virile groups of Males, Teenagers and twenty-somethings who live in each separate neighborhood, yet the borders of each territory are ill-defined. Each neighborhood seems to have a group of tough, young males who have self-proclaimed themselves protectors of the neighborhood. However, if your neighborhood doesn’t have a group of young, tough males, groups (or gangs) of other young tough males will come to your neighborhood and start shit and destroy property. They only respect force. In this portion of the movie there is gang violence, a little sex and a ton of young male posturing. Honestly, the beginning is the least interesting and weakest executed portion of the film. But like great Enchiladas that sit in your fridge for a day, this movie improves and matures as it goes along.
One of my issues with the opening sequence is the overuse of over dramatic music because so many stark acts of violence and impact occur in the early segments of the movie, there is a rush to manipulate the audience’s feelings with scenes of physical suffering and youthful frustration-fueled violence. In the second portion of the movie, Miklo goes to prison for murder, Paco becomes a Marine and Cruz has a heart breaking tragic experience as an up-and-coming visual artist. The majority of this portion of the movie is spent in a barrage of tense prison scenes. I don’t recall how raw prison films were before 1993, “Blood In, Blood Out” is fairly raw, though true grotesque acts are not shown in their entirety. There are a myriad of prison shankings in this film, more than I could ever hope to count. The prisoners make shanks out of anything in this movie, there is a also a scene involving Latin Prison Gang Leader Montana (played with fantastic zen-like intensity by Enrique Castillo)showing Miklo where are the best spots on the Human body to kill someone with a knife blow. I was guessing that this scene was part of the reason it took so long to get this film to DVD release, the movie has just been released for the first time to DVD this Summer in 2024, got to be a story there.
The savagery of the second portion of the film carries on to the two subsequent sections of the movie, the final section is a like a 15-minute epilogue that is filled with compelling resolutions and pay-off lines. In the second section of the film, there are several rough scenes involving attempted prison rapes, usually it’s an inmate attempting to rape Miklo, several inmates suggesting that his size and skin tone make him an ideal rape victim; all will soon learn Miklo is not the guy to attempt to sexually assault. The climate of sado-masochistic domination is unleashed on Miklo by Latino inmates and Whites alike, he is immediately disrespected and not initially welcomed by any of the gangs, it won’t be long before he is raped. Just as he does in the Neighborhood back home, Miklo proves himself to be suicidal and psychotic at just the right times in regards to his own survival, as well as a lethal killer who is smart and deceptive. Chapa’s intense glare and overall edginess are his best attributes in this as an actor. He is less believable when he has to deliver lines in regular conversation than when he is fighting for his life on screen in scenes of violent confrontation.
As for Cruz, the artist, the film delves into drug use, family tragedy and cynical ramblings about society from a drugged-up Latino artist. Cruz combines as an artist his pop visual style with depictions of young Latinos. He sells paintings to rich White folks, remember art galleries? As tragic as the film portrays 1970’s drug use, the sequences with the extended family are fairly leaden and dull, you don’t even recall what any of the family actors are saying. Bratt doesn’t have much going on in this second portion of the film, just looking dandy in his Marine uniform, like the Latin participant on a recruiting poster. Miklo roughs, toughs and murders his way into the graces of the Latin prison gang. They all seem to lift weights all day in the prison yard bare-chested and wearing sun glasses in the glare of the incessant heat above the structure of San Quentin. Miklo is now accepted into the higher echelons of the gang so random assholes stop trying to sexually assault him. Throughout the film, Miklo is never with a Woman and seems to be intensely emotionally engaged in the bonds of brotherhood and acceptance; it’s touching, it’s moving, it’s slightly homo-erotic, which is also a unique point of the film is that brutal convicts in this movie profess and display tenderness and love towards each other in a world where there are no Women.
The third and fourth portions of this film are a few sequences of Miklo being out of prison, Cruz attempting to continue his Art career while essentially being a functioning junkie with a checkered past, and the movie begins to focus on Paco and his eventual run-in with Miklo, now that one is an undercover cop and one is a Con on probation living in a halfway house with….a bunch of Cons, most of whom he just served with in San Quentin. During the third section, the film seems to propose that for some the world itself is a prison, the caste systems are similar, so for Cons the outside world is actually harder to navigate than the inside of prison. Miklo’s life sucks so he turns back to crime again, Paco is the only protagonist that is living a law-abiding life and he is hated and a pariah due to the unspoken idea that he is living in deference to his Chicano background and doing the White Man’s dirty justice work for him. The action scenes in the third section of the film are solid; shootouts, hostage situations, fist fights are all filmed with an atmosphere of authentic spontaneity. Carlos Carrasco as Popeye brings a slippery, sketchy presence to the halfway house that Miklo is attempting to rehabilitate at, which of course, just becomes the headquarters for mapping out an armored truck heist.
The Fourth section of the film returns to prison, and things get really out of hand. For this movie, that is actually saying a lot, the Fourth and Firth section take over an hour together, in this we learn that the expression “blood in, blood out” refers to the Hispanic gang in prison, that one must spill blood at the gang’s behest to enter the gang, and that only having one’s blood spilled would cause them to ever leave the gang. Where the second section of the film seemed more concerned with inner-prison society control through violent sex, the Fourth section seemed to be concerned with the bonds of brotherhood and a war inside the prison between the Latin protagonists and their nemeses, the BGA (Black Guerilla Army) and the Aryan Nation (The White Guys), Delroy Lindo pops up in this as the leader of the Black Guerillas, Billy Bob Thornton is a scraggly bearded smart mouthed White Supremacist.
Victor Rivers and Danny Trejo are side men in the prison gang, Rivers as Magic Mike (I didn’t make that up) is particularly good and effective in the role of a prison bad-ass. Rivers is a bigger dude and has some quirky looking facial hair, it’s a memorable character performance in part because his look is so cool. The tone of some of the gang council scenes are a tad over-animated and pretentious. The scenes including Montana are the most believable to me due to the character’s tone and pace, he is very reserved and calculating in a Machiavellian manner. During the key scenes of action involving Latin protagonists, Hackford stages a “Godfather”-esque montage as he segues between a Mexican Heritage parade in the barrio, complete with dancing Aztec and Mayan warriors, and the obsessive spirit of the warriors of the past manifesting in the souls of the gang members in their violent confrontations in the present.
Of all the performers, which includes Richard Masur as a slimy snarky jail lawyer, the performance that stands out the most, is Benjamin Bratt as Paco, just a mesmerizing performance. Bratt has a commanding size and a handsome mug, but his range is surprising and dynamic in this, I can’t say I saw him in much else. His ability to project a sort of controlled instability in this was remarkable. Cinematographer Gabriel Bernstain gives the movie a Golden hue when the movie is involved either in San Quentin outdoor scenes or some outdoor Los Angeles locales. Otherwise, whatever prison they shot this in, the cells were really tiny, there is an abundance of a feeling of claustrophobia in watching this. Jimmy Santiago Baca is credited with writing the screenplay for this, based upon his life experiences. He must have had quite a formative childhood and early adulthood to live through that and live to tell the tale (On Blu-ray and DVD).
Where is the respect for this ambitious populist opus outside of the Hood and the Neighborhood Bar? This film has execution flaws, several scenes play like they were written for Robert Townsend’s satirical “Hollywood Shuffle” in terms of their Minority stereotyping, but often times the macho posturing is believable. While it’s opening is at times awkward and telegraphed, the film morphs into a Gangster epic for Mexicans, but instead of being about criminal empires, it’s about staking a claim to a kind of spiritual manhood, and sticking to conjoined masculine goals. For the Criminal, it’s about honor, for the Artist it’s about truth no matter how painful, for the Cop it’s about moral strength. Yet, devoid of almost any Female characters, this movie is most certainly about defining masculinity as a pursuit of mind, soul and body. All of the characters are dead serious about issues involving their pride. Their passion for their causes of etiquette are inspiring, Cruz has a couple of emotional speeches later in the film that are the product of the wisdom that he has come upon through a life of recklessness and redemption.
“Blood In, Blood Out” is not a retro-active Oscar contender in late-night bar debates by any means, although I would lobby for Bratt and Enrique Castillo as Montana as potential overlooked nominees for that year. There is a maverick quality to this film I believe, it’s stunning to me that this film initially lost Buena Vista $30 million dollars to make, coming in at a budget of 35 million. It is apparently a cult classic in the Mexican-American community and small wonder. There are obvious comparisons to 1992’s “American Me”, which is arguably a better film. However, I feel Edward James Olmos’ effort has an element of pragmatic nihilism which leaves it clinical and depressing in comparison to “Blood In, Blood Out”. There is an inspirational timbre to this film that is hard to define. Miklo, Cruz and Paco are characters molded in the great Hollywood tradition of American crime films, but Baca’s script adds a twist and makes the characters distinctly of Mexican descent more about their spiritual journey than their material one. This film celebrates the virtues of spirituality, loyalty and integrity before anything.
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