Pontecorvo's embattled epic is one of those rare films that declare that freedom is worth the fight. Set in the mid-nineteenth century on a fictional island of Portuguese-possessed sugar plantations, Queimada! looks at history as an unfolding of contradictory machinations. Marlon Brando plays William Walker, an agent provocateur under the employ of the British government. His assignment: to disrupt the Portuguese hold on sugar, allowing the tea merchants of London to sweeten their pots. A moody pragmatist, Walker meets an uneducated dockworker, José Dolores (played with passion by Evaristo Márquez), and from him fashions a fierce freedom fighter-slavery ends and the rebels rule. But according to history, there's no failure like success, so ten years later the wily Walker is back to reverse the rebellion. Queimada! categorically sides with the rebels. José Dolores bears the historical weight of the downtrodden while Walker remains the lofty imperialist spouting airy homilies. Though Pontecorvo's gutsy film dwells on the past, the rebellious spirit transcends the topical; as Walker warns, “ideas travel.”