One Man's Hero
| One Man's Hero | |
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DVD cover
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| Directed by | Lance Hool |
| Produced by | Lance Hool William J. MacDonald Conrad Hool |
| Written by | Milton S. Gelman |
| Starring | |
| Music by | Ernest Troost |
| Cinematography | João Fernandes |
| Edited by | Mark Conte |
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Production
company |
Hool/Macdonald Productions
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| Distributed by | Orion Classics (US) |
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Release date
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Running time
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126 minutes |
| Country | United States Mexico Spain |
| Language | English |
One Man's Hero is a 1999 historical war drama film directed by Lance Hool and starring Tom Berenger, Joaquim de Almeida and Daniela Romo. The film has the distinction of being the last film released by Orion Pictures' arthouse division Orion Classics, as well as being the last Orion Pictures film, until 2013, when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer revived the Orion Pictures brand to release the remake of the 1976 film The Town That Dreaded Sundown.
The film is a dramatization of the true story of Jon Riley and the Saint Patrick's Battalion, a group of Irish Catholic immigrants who desert from the mostly Protestant U.S. Army to the mostly Catholic Mexican side during the Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848.
The story centers around Sgt. John Riley and 16 men of his U.S. Army battalion who (against military law) are whipped for "desertion" only because they had traveled—without an explicit permission—to the Mexican side of the border to fulfill their religious obligation to attend Mass, and because they are thought to be "Papists" whose loyalty is ipso facto suspect in the eyes of their Protestant commanders. Sgt. Riley, with regard for the safety and well-being of his men, releases them at gun-point from the lash. He escorts them across the border to Mexico to hopefully find at Vera Cruz a ship back to Ireland, only to be violently captured by the revolutionary Juan Cortina as enemies of Mexico. Riley, wounded in his thigh, is nursed by Cortina's woman Marta. As Cortina considers what to eventually do with Riley and his men, news arrives that the U.S. and Mexico are now at war, and if they are captured they could be hanged. Because of this, the Irish deserters are presented with the choice of joining and fighting on the side of the Mexican revolutionaries under Cortina, or be executed by him as enemies of his country.
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Wikipedia