This is a real gem of an album -- a big, sweeping, score using an orchestra, filled with hints and suggestions of all those bygone dusty Westerns, shot through with visions of hot nights south of the border. Composer Lee Holdridge has had quite a diverse background, which helps here, and appears to love movies, which goes a long way towards making this score work. Old Gringo is built around the end of Ambrose Bierce's life. Bierce was an acerbic journalist and writer (amongst other things, he produced The Devil's Dictionary, a sarcastic lexicon of terms that would have made Oscar Wilde applaud) who wound up, late in life, south of the border and possibly involved with Pancho Villa's army. He never returned, and nothing more is known. The book, and the movie from it, place that story in the context of two others players -- a self-exiled schoolteacher and a general in Villa's army. This gives Holdridge three themes to play with -- there are plenty of additional subthemes as well -- and he plays with them very well indeed. The experience is symphonic; the man knows how to work with an orchestral palette. It isn't all that subtle, true, but, then again, neither is the work of Ferde Grofe or, in fact, much of Copeland's frontier-influenced work -- there's that open, rangy, energy here. ~ Steven McDonald, All Music Guide
Lee Holdridge (Producer), George Doering (Guitar), Tom Boyd (Woodwind), Tom Carlson (Music Editor), Dennis Budimir (Guitar), Ira Hearshen (Orchestration), Lee Holdridge (Conductor), Steve Bartkowicz (Assistant Engineer), Tom Carlson (Editing), Bobby Fernandez (Engineer), Frank Capp (Music Contractor), Malcolm McNabb (Trumpet), Gary Gray (Woodwind), Frank Capp (?), Marcos Loya (Guitar), Dave Marquette (Mixing), Michael O'Donovan (Woodwind), Mark Banning (Design), Mark Banning (Graphic Production), Gene Norman (Executive Producer), Barbara Northcutt (Woodwind), Louise Di Tullio (Woodwind), Steve Bartkowicz (Mixing), Lee Holdridge (Composer), Rick Riccio (Remixing), Ford A. Thaxton (Producer), Ray Kramer (Cello), Earl Dumler (Woodwind)
Mexicans transporting her from Chihuahua actually belong to a unit of Pancho Villa's army. They use her luggage to smuggle weapons to the servants at the Miranda hacienda, who in turn aid the attacking revolutionary army of General Tomas Arroyo (Jimmy Smits).
During the attack, a sardonic "Old Gringo," who is really American author Ambrose Bierce (Gregory Peck), joins in the fighting on the side of the revolution, operating the track switch that ensures a railroad flatcar laden with explosives reaches its target.
After the Miranda hacienda is taken, Winslow becomes romantically smitten alternately with Bierce and Arroyo. Bierce has come to Mexico to die in anonymity, feeling that his fifty years as a writer have won him praise only for his style, not for the truth that he's tried to tell. Arroyo, by contrast, has returned to the hacienda where he was born. His father was actually a Miranda who had raped his peasant mother. Later, in his youth, Arroyo murdered his father.
While his army enjoys luxuries they have never known on the war-damaged but palatial Miranda estate, Arroyo becomes obsessed with his past and, transfixed by childhood memories of his family buried there, fails to move his army when ordered by Villa. To snap Arroyo out of his fixation, thus averting a mutiny of his officers, Bierce burns papers that the illiterate Arroyo considers sacred—papers that supposedly entitle the peasants to the hacienda land. But Arroyo responds by shooting Bierce in the back, killing him. Bierce dies in Winslow's arms.
Winslow later goes to the U.S. embassy in Mexico to claim Bierce's body and bring it back to the United States, saying that it is that of her long-lost father. This puts Villa in a predicament because a U.S. citizen was murdered by one of his generals. So, wishing to avoid American meddling in the revolution, he has Winslow sign a statement that her father had joined the revolution and was executed for disobeying orders, as was General Arroyo who had shot him, and that she witnessed both executions. She signs the statement, is provided with the coffin bearing Bierce's body, and witnesses the execution of Arroyo.
