The Life of General Villa

The film was produced by D. W. Griffith and featured future director Raoul Walsh as the younger version of Villa.

[1][2] Pancho Villa's reason for starring in the movie was financial as he needed funds to help the Mexican Revolution.

(The contract resides in a museum in Mexico City at the Archivo Federico Gonzalez Garza, folio 3057.)

Raoul Walsh wrote extensively about the experience in his autobiography Each Man in His Time,[3] describing Villa's charisma as well as noting that peasants would knock the teeth out of corpses with rocks in the wake of firing squads in order to harvest the gold fillings, which was captured on film and had the projectionists vomiting in the screening room back in Los Angeles.

The following year, Walsh played John Wilkes Booth in Griffith's epic The Birth of a Nation[4] and directed the early gangster movie, Regeneration, on location in the Bowery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.