by Philip French , The Observer, Sunday 4 January 2009

• Related: Peter Bradshaw’s review of “Che”

This month is the 50th anniversary of the overthrow of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista and his replacement by Fidel Castro, who, sadly enough, was also to become a dictator. Shortly after the revolution, however, there emerged a more attractive and charismatic figure, his Argentinian lieutenant Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who became one of the great heroes of the 1960s counterculture and was murdered by the Bolivian army in association with the CIA in 1967. There was much talk at the time of a movie about Che’s life. Tony Richardson was going to make one from a screenplay by Alan Sillitoe and one of the greatest political film-makers, Italian Marxist Francesco Rosi, sent posters all over Europe announcing his search for an unknown Che lookalike.

In the event, Hollywood got in first with Richard Fleischer’s Che! (1969), co-scripted by the formerly black-listed Michael Wilson, co-author of Lawrence of Arabia, with Omar Sharif as a glamorous Che and Jack Palance as a villainous drunken Fidel. Told in flashback from Che’s death, it was a compromised work in almost every way that pleased neither his friends nor his enemies.

Now, partly, one supposes, as a reaction against the policies of the Bush administration, there has been a renewed interest in Che and he’s jumped off the T-shirts and back into the cinema, starting with The Motorcycle Diaries, produced by Robert Redford and directed by Brazilian Walter Salles. In that attractive film, the young Che (handsome Gael García Bernal), newly graduated from medical school in Buenos Aires, makes a lengthy journey around South America with a chum in the early 1950s and is politicised by the experience.

Steven Soderbergh‘s two-part film picks up from there. The first part opens with Che (Benicio Del Toro) meeting Fidel in Mexico City in 1955 (both clean shaven at the time) and joining the small invasion party that established a base in the Sierra Maestra in Cuba. It ends in January 1959 when the 30-year-old Che, cautioning against triumphalism and forbidding his men to indulge in looting, heads towards Havana to begin what he considers the really important part of the revolution, creating a new kind of society.

It’s an intelligent, fast-moving, well-researched film, based in part on Che’s posthumously published Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, offering both a convincing account of the bitter, hard-fought struggle and a portrait of a great and complex revolutionary. He was first valued for his medical skills, but soon became such an essential adviser that Fidel tried to keep him out of harm’s way.

Che stands alongside his fellow communist Leon Trotsky as a model of the intellectual as man of action. Like him, he was a writer, thinker, strategist and tactician. Ruthless men of honour, they made up in courage and willpower what they lacked in physique (Che suffered throughout his life from chronic asthma) and died violently in exile. All this comes out vividly in the course of an exciting, adventurous narrative with Guevara figuring in virtually every scene.

The war is shot in colour, into which Soderbergh, who also photographed the film, cuts black-and-white, newsreel-style footage of Che’s subsequent appearances in New York following the revolution. In these flash-forwards, he defends Cuban policy in private discussion and publicly before the United Nations, challenging a hostile America, represented by Adlai Stevenson, and representatives of right-wing Latin American countries. Del Toro shows Che growing through the challenges and privations of the struggle, and one looks forward to Che – Part 2 which opens towards the end of February.