Mr. Riley (Photo: Emily Anne Epstein)

Filming didn’t get off to a great start for On the Road star Sam Riley, who plays narrator Sal Paradise in the adaptation of the Jack Kerouac classic. As the movie opens, Paradise’s father has just died, and fellow Brit Tom Sturridge, playing Carlo Marx analogue Allen Ginsberg, comes up and whispers a Hebrew dirge in his ear, an attempt at comfort.

There they were, two English guys still relatively early in their careers, excited to be kicking off the making of a movie that took decades to realize. And things went well for a few hours—until suddenly the clouds rolled in, the sky went black and the rain started pelting them like marbles. They took refuge from the thunderstorm in their trailer, wondering whether they might simply be sent home.

“We were laughing that it was Kerouac and Ginsberg pissing on us because they didn’t want two English guys playing them,” Mr. Riley told The Observer, sitting across a coffee table at the Regency Hotel.

Mr. Riley’s long, rangy figure looms, whereas Kerouac was compact, but in his sweatshirt and Levi’s he could almost pass for a dressed-down postwar college boy. “To be able to play Jack Kerouac or Sal Paradise,” Mr. Riley muses in his thick Leeds accent, “it’s mad to me.”

No discussion about American literature is complete without Kerouac’s 1957 ode to the West and its promise of freedom. And yet for all its quintessential Americaness, and its place of pride within the U.S. 20th-century literary canon, it took an international lot to finally pull off an adaptation of this supposedly unfilmable novel. Two of Mr. Riley’s highest-profile co-stars—Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty and Kristen Stewart as Moriarty’s first wife Marylou—are American, but director Walter Salles is Brazilian and screenwriter José Rivera is from Puerto Rico.

Mr. Riley was born and raised in the north of England, and these days he resides in Berlin. Best known for his 2007 turn in the cult hit Control as Joy Division front man Ian Curtis, he said he occasionally draws double takes but doesn’t have the tabs following him around just yet. “I’m in a position where I can say what I say no to, but I can’t call Marty up and say, ‘Are you sick of Leo yet?’”

Before hitting the road to shoot On the Road, he’d never seen much of America outside of New York and Los Angeles. And frankly, at this point in his life, the 32-year-old would just as soon stay at home with his wife, German actress Alexandra Maria Lara. (A major part of his motive for moving to Berlin, Ms. Lara is more often recognized on the street than he is.)

“I’m quite settled now. I’ve no interest in going on a road trip,” her husband admitted. “If I want to go on holiday, I want to sit on a beach, swim, drink cocktails and read a book.”

So who does this guy think he is, playing the thinly disguised avatar of Kerouac?

“Well, don’t think I didn’t ask myself the same question,” Mr. Riley told The Observer, levering himself off the couch to grab a pack of Gauloises. He offered one, pointing out the German labels: “If you can’t understand the warning, it doesn’t affect you in the same way,” he noted.

Mr. Riley, in character.

Even if Kerouac had never written another word, the runaway popularity of On the Road would have anointed him as the prince of the Beats (though he was reluctant to wear the mantle). More important, it turned him into a kind of Saint Christopher for adolescent males, blessing their itchy feet and boldest backpacking schemes even as the country grew ever more claustrophobically suburban.

“One of the biggest parts for me was knowing that everyone would say, ‘Well, why the fuck did they hire an English guy to play Jack Kerouac?’” he admitted. Much time was invested honing his American accent, which he figured was the least he could do.

Beside the technical challenge was the sheer burden of expectation. Early in the project, he saw an interview with Johnny Depp (often cited by fans as a decent choice for the role) in which the star expressed relief that he didn’t play Sal Paradise in the film, owing to the pressure that came with it. “I remember thinking, ‘I don’t want to know, I don’t want to know about that,’” Mr. Riley said.

When Mr. Riley initially auditioned, it was 2008. Mr. Hedlund had already been cast as Dean Moriarty, but the project promptly collapsed, a victim of the financial crisis. Mr. Riley had entirely written the project off when, two years later, he got the call that the movie was on and he had the gig. “I wasn’t asked; I was just sort of told I was doing it.”

Despite their obvious differences, Mr. Riley found several ways into the character, from their common industrial upbringings to his own work as a lyricist—“not wanting to sound in any way in the same league of writing,” he was quick to disclaim.

Kerouac hadn’t exactly seen much of the country until he set out with Neal Cassady, either. “He grew up in a very sheltered environment with his mother and a father who was very dominant, and had had no experience of the great wide plains of America until he got into the road and in the car and on his own.”

“In that sense, I didn’t need to have seen it before I had to play it.”

This version of On the Road reads between the lines and reanimates the faint ghost of homosexual tension that haunts the novel. Since he’d never read the book, Mr. Riley’s first encounter with the story was Kerouac’s first draft, written in scroll form, which is more explicit. But the overt direction it takes in the movie may catch a few viewers off guard.

“I don’t think they drove around America having sex with each other, Jack and Neal, but it did happen, from what I understand,” Mr. Riley said. “In a lot of ways, they were very liberal and forward-thinking in a very conservative time and country.”

And yet the main thing most people want to ask him about is the prospect of stripping down with Ms. Stewart, the starlet who made her name in the Twilight franchise. “I’m doing interviews with Elle magazine about sex scenes with Kristen Stewart, which is all they really want to know about,” he said. Here they are adapting a counter-cultural literary classic, but the biggest point of interest is the sex scenes. “The irony isn’t lost on me,” he said.

During filming, he was also keenly aware of their 10-year age difference and their significant others. “There are nicer ways to spend an afternoon,” said the happily married star, quickly adding that he meant no offense to his co-star.

The footage in the rain was ultimately more memorable, he said. Though the scene didn’t make it into the American cut, it set the tone for the whole project: “Nothing was really going to go quite according to plan,” he said. “But there’d be lots of happy accidents that would capture the spontaneity of the prose."

Hence, I’m not as privileged as some of my colleagues in ascertaining the accuracy of casting Gael García Bernal as the 23-year-old Ché and Rodrigo De la Serna as the 29-year-old Alberto Granado. I was nonetheless moved by their initial easygoing camaraderie and their subsequent immersion in the sufferings of those they encountered while exploring the continent. Ché, particularly, has been described by some as more macho and muscular than the delicately featured and slightly built Mr. Bernal, who gained our attention in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros (2000), Alfonso Cuaron’s Y Tu Mamá También (2001) and Carlos Carrera’s The Crime of Father Amaro (2002). He’ll be seen later this year in Pedro Almodóvar’s Bad Education, a highlight of this year’s New York Film Festival. By any standard, he is a hot talent in Latin-American cinema. The criticism of Mr. De la Serna as Alberto Granado—still active in his 80’s as the health minister in Fidel Castro’s Cuba—has less to do with Mr. De la Serna’s physical appearance than with his portrayal of Mr. Granado as a comically relentless skirt-chaser. This is presumably no way to treat a revered icon of the Cuban Revolution.

The fact that Mr. Salles and Mr. Rivera have taken these liberties with such a politically sacred subject makes The Motorcycle Diaries all the more emotionally complex and universally accessible (especially in the United Sates, where the shifting winds of Cuban exile opinion in Florida may help decide the choice of our next President). However, I must confess somewhat mixed feelings towards this very skillful resurrection of the Ché Guevara legend.

On the one hand, I have never believed that the lying slut Chiquita Banana should shape our policy toward Cuba. (I say "lying slut" because for years she persuaded me never to put a banana in the refrigerator; the avoidable spoilage that inevitably occurred put more money in the pockets of the United Fruit Company, her corporate pimp). But on the other hand, my memory of the late, great gay cinematographer Néstor Almendros flashes before me as a reminder of the repression of civil liberties and political freedoms in Castro’s Cuba. Even so, the horrors of an earlier Marxist experiment gone awry in Lenin’s and Stalin’s Soviet Union were well on the way to being exposed before Ché launched his quixotic crusade to unify Latin America into one indivisible People’s Socialist Republic.

What then is the answer to this political quandary? Must we replace the economic exploitation and injustice of global capitalism with the seemingly inevitable totalitarianism of global Marxism—or is there a third way? A wishy-washy centrism with a little less exploitation and injustice seems to be one of the few remaining options for the Kerry campaign, and I’m afraid that this is where this reviewer is ideologically stranded. Unwilling to surrender my bourgeois lifestyle, which permits me to express myself with comparative freedom, can I really look into the eyes of the oppressed farmers and workers that Mr. Bernal and Mr. Serna encounter at every turn in The Motorcycle Diaries, more than half a century after the real-life Guevera and Granado went on their journey? Nothing much has changed in all that time—and, as things are going, will anything change in the next half-century?

There’s an aesthetic danger rife with pathetic fallacies in this particular territory. Cinema magnifies every facial signifier of abject misery into a howling accusation, leaving the inescapably voyeuristic viewer guilty of callous indifference at the very least. O Brother, Where Art Thou?, indeed!

Fortunately, Mr. Salles and Mr. Rivera have rescued the viewer from compassion fatigue with long interludes of hedonistic high spirits fueled by youthful energy. Several of these interludes are entertaining group-dance spectacles in which communal feelings of solidarity transcend the lechery of macho ego-trips. On one occasion, the high spirits get out of hand and our two youthful protagonists have to run for their lives from a jealous husband and his Chilean friends, none of whom like Argentineans. In another episode, Ché is teased good-naturedly for mistakenly dancing the tango in Brazilian rumba territory.

On a more serious note, Ché persuades a morbidly depressed young woman to have an operation to save her arm by talking about his own depression over having been born with asthma. Even here, Mr. Salles and Mr. Rivera avoid the tedium of those obligatory scenes when turning points are achieved. Hence, when Ché receives a letter from his girlfriend, we have only to look at the expression on his face to know that he’s been jilted; there is no need to read the letter to himself, his friend or the audience.

Some of the scenic wonders of South America are paraded before us with a fitting sense of existential irony as our youthful protagonists take the so-called Western route through Argentina, Chile, Peru and the Amazon Basin and across mountains, deserts and rivers; for part of that way, they travel on an oil-guzzling wreck of a motorcycle that eventually breaks down completely, and for the rest of the journey via a tiring combination of walking and hitchhiking.

The point is that if I was moved despite my ingrained skepticism about Ché Guevara and Castro’s Cuba, you probably will be too. Mr. Salles expresses his thoughts on making the film thus: "If there’s one thing I can tell you about this experience that we shared—‘we’ being the group of people who went on the road together for two years to do this project—it’s that, like Ernesto and Alberto, we were very different when we got to the end of our journey in comparison to where we were when we started."

In the final analysis, The Motorcycle Diaries is the kind of movie that can change us all for the better, and I can think of no higher praise.

Anyone for Tennis?

Richard Loncraine’s Wimbledon, from a screenplay by Adam Brooks, Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin, is a pleasant enough entertainment at a time when movies either pleasant or entertaining are in short supply. Yet by the time the farfetched but utterly predictable plot reaches its preordained climax (with a particularly silly coda at the end), I am reminded of why I am a sports fan, but not a sports-movie fan. This is to say that the suspense and excitement generated by the greatest of the Connor-Borg, Connors-McEnroe, McEnroe-Borg, Sampras-Agassi and Agassi-Federer matches can never be fabricated in a mere movie. For one thing, there is no moral to any of these titanic real-life contests: On a given day, one superlative player simply is superior to another superlative player. That’s all, folks. Yet in Wimbledon, we are asked to believe that a 119th-ranked British player would win Wimbledon over a hot-shot, bullying American player who has rolled over obstacles like Messrs. Federer and Hewitt (just in the movie, of course) without losing a set. As the answer to Britain’s long famine in men’s tennis at Wimbledon, Paul Bettany’s Peter Colt cuts a more romantic figure than poor Tim Henman, the real-life, gallant Brit overachiever with limited talent who fails, year after year, to get to the finals at Wimbledon despite much hype.

Fortunately, Mr. Loncraine, the sophisticated British director of such films as Brimstone and Treacle (1982) and a politically updated Richard III (1995), has a light enough touch to take the sting out of tweaking the Yanks, represented by Kirsten Dunst’s Lizzie Bradbury, a win-at-all-costs tennis champion incongruously drawn to a sweetly self-doubting Brit loser type like Peter. Also in the Yank contingent invading the hallowed, grassy playing fields of Wimbledon are Dennis Bradbury (Sam Neill), a mildly overbearing member of that fierce kamikaze tribe of women’s-tennis fathers; Ron Roth (Jon Favreau), a terminally cynical player’s agent clutching the Union Jack in one hand and the Stars and Stripes in the other; and finally—and most egregiously—the smirking, sneering American tennis champ, Jake Hammond (Austin Nichol). Boo! Hiss!

Peter is blessed, or cursed, with a feisty family consisting of his mother, flaky Augusta Colt (Eleanor Bron); her often estranged, in-the-treehouse husband, Edward (Bernard Hill); and Peter’s singularly disloyal brother, Carl (James McAvoy), who regularly bets against his sibling. Still, all’s well that ends well when Peter wins Wimbledon and retires with Lizzie, who (we’re told in Peter’s voice-over) has gone on to win two Wimbledon championships of her own. So everybody’s happy; Ms. Dunst and Mr. Bettany have the right chemistry; and the tennis action is speeded up to provide the equivalent of an entertaining video game. What more do you want for your 10 bucks—popcorn with a pickle?

Pulp Sci-Fi

Kerry Conran’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is such an interestingly silly movie that I found myself idly wondering what particular audience was being targeted with its peculiar conceits and infinitude of special effects. Its A-list cast has been reduced to cartoonish stooges who may as well have been animated to fit more snugly into the wildly conceived backgrounds of far-flung places like New York City and Nepal, as well as the oceans and mountains in between. Just as curiously, this is not exactly a futuristic sci-fi film: All the action takes place in 1939, and "the world of tomorrow" refers not to the future, but to some crazy scheme of a pre–World War I German scientist ghoulishly "played" through stills and old movie images by the late Laurence Olivier. (The idea sounds more offensive before you see the movie than it actually turns out to be—except in its anticlimactic feebleness as a publicity-seeking device.)

The movie begins with a zeppelin flying over Manhattan and docking atop the Empire State Building, and a German scientist descending from the dirigible with two vials in his hand. I was 11 years old in 1939, and I remember the Graf Zeppelin burning up at its New Jersey landing site a year or two earlier. Later, when I saw newsreels, I noticed that the zeppelin sported a conspicuous swastika. Of course, 1939 was the year in which Europe was plunged into World War II. What, then, were all those clambering mechanical giants stomping through the streets of Manhattan in a direct steal from George Lucas’ Star Wars series (the single most anti-Bazinian step in sending movies away from their realistic roots and into the fantasy factories)? Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Angelina Jolie and Giovanni Ribisi do their best with the self-consciously pulpy and campy material, but all the parts are written at what used to be known as the "B-picture" level.

And in the fall, we'll have a brand-new Che movie, an adaptation of The Motorcycle Diaries , Guevara's record of his seven-month motorbike trip across South America in 1952. The director is Walter Salles, the Brazilian director of Central Station and producer of City of God , who employs Mexican heartthrob Gael García Bernal as the charismatically fragile Che (who suffered from chronic asthma). American audiences will not be especially surprised: Mr. Bernal, star of Amores Perros and Y Tu Mamá También , already played Che in Showtime's Fidel miniseries last year. As the rising Latin star of his generation, the 24-year-old Mr. García Bernal will undoubtedly do for Che what Antonio Banderas did for him in Andrew Lloyd Weber's Evita : make him, yet again, a Reinvented Hero.

None of this is new, of course. Che got his first big-screen glorification in 1969, just two years after his death, in 20th Century Fox's Che! , with Jack Palance as Castro and Omar Sharif as a sultry Che. We didn't exactly see Omar-as-Che dealing with the vexing problems of sugar production as a Cuban minister, but we did get a voluptuously endearing and idealistic social reformer not unlike Doctor Zhivago. Olivetti even used Che for one of its ads, with the caption: "We would have hired him." (As what? An enforcer?)

Current vapid commercializations of the Che mystique include the cover of Madonna's new CD American Life , on which the venerable pop star strikes a Che pose. Meanwhile, the iconic Korda image of Che adorns the key rings, rolling papers and fridge magnets that drip from a thousand sidewalk stalls, along with copies of his dozens of books, especially The Motorcycle Diaries . All this is in addition to Che beer bottles and a Che Smirnoff vodka ad campaign. A Steven Soderbergh Che project has also been rumored, with Benicio del Toro in the title role.

The refusal to see Che for what he really was is proving to be a strangely obstinate phenomenon. You never know where it will turn up next. Three years ago, for example, Presidential hopeful Gary Hart published a novel called I, Che Guevara under the pseudonym John Blackthorn. It's a thriller set in Cuba, in which a shadowy figure somewhat resembling the long-dead Che roams that miserable isle looking for a "third way" between Castro's Communism and Miami vice. But oddly, given Che's actual history of affection for totalitarian methods, this fictional Che turns out to be a fan of Thomas Jefferson and the ideals of the Republic. Mr. Hart's fantasy of Che Guevara, in other words, is a suave projection of the average, decent, middle-class white American liberal's political sensibility. Then again, how could he be anything else?

Cold War historian Robert Conquest commented on the "rebirth" of Che in his 1999 book, Reflections on a Ravaged Century , citing the "persistence to this day of an adolescent revolutionary romanticism, as one of the unfortunate afflictions to which the human mind was and is prone." It's being demonstrated "yet again with (hardly credible though it may be) a revival of the cult of the totalitarian terrorist Che Guevara," Mr. Conquest wrote.

He also notes a conversation he once had with Adam Watson, the former British ambassador to Havana, who commented that while Castro was an "amiable rogue," Guevara was a "cold-blooded hypocrite." But who among the avid consumers of Che memorabilia and cinematic epics would echo or even understand such sentiments? Omar Sharif as a cold-blooded hypocrite? Cute and sympathetic Gael García Bernal as a totalitarian terrorist?

Mr. Bernal, for his part, seems to speak for his generation when he expresses his admiration for Che. In a January interview with the Daily News of Los Angeles , he remarked that the role meant a great deal to him. "To play Che Guevara," he said, "he was an amazing character. He's a person that changed the world and really forces me to change the rules of what I am." In a December interview with the Los Angeles Times , Mr. Bernal told a reporter that to prepare for the role, he'd been reading Karl Marx and Pablo Neruda. And, he added, "I feel a lot of responsibility. I want to do it well because of what [Che] represents to the world. He is a romantic. He had a political consciousness that changed Latin America."

Mr. Salles himself, meanwhile, thinks Che has been revived in Latin America because he is ever more relevant to the continent's problems, which are composed of the same "structural problems and injustices" that Che addressed 50 years ago: "If anything can change our perception of the world," Mr. Salles has said, "it's the possibility of proposing an outlook proper to this continent, which doesn't mimic that of Europe or the United States."

And let's not overlook the words of Mike Tyson, who has a tattoo of Guevara, next to those of Arthur Ashe and Chairman Mao. "An incredible individual," Mr. Tyson says cheerily of Che. "Someone who had so much, but sacrificed it all for the benefit of other people."

Which other people would that be? Cubans?

A Budding Errol Flynn

Ernesto (Che) Guevara de la Serna was born in 1928 in the Argentine city of Rosario, into a slightly decayed but respectable bourgeois family. Part of the family was Irish, part Spanish, and their politics could be described as a genteel left-leaning liberalism, anti-Nazi and anti-Peronist in equal measure. Guevara studied medicine at the University of Buenos Aires, graduating in 1953 and hanging around in Communist circles. Meanwhile, he had embarked on a series of voyages across the continent, two of them by motorcycle, with his friend Alberto Granado, who ran a dispensary at the leper colony of San Francisco del Chanar near Cordoba. Che's encounter with Granado's lepers on the first trip in 1951 is often cited as having radicalized his social conscience. And during the second voyage, in 1952, while in Lima, Peru, he met Dr. Hugo Pesce, the head of the Peruvian national leprosy program and an avid Marxist.

Che's long conversations with Pesce had a profound effect on him, as he himself later avowed. Leprosy, poverty and Marx: They made for a powerful moral cocktail in the mind of a privileged medical student from Rosario. He promptly wrote a letter home quoting the words of José Martí: "I want to link my destiny to that of the poor of this world."

It would be obtuse not to admit that part of Che's charm is his successful breakout from middle-class routines. Che lived out a fantasy to which few of us are immune. The social pathologies of Latin America are also real enough. To be radicalized by a Peruvian leper colony is neither perverse nor beyond comprehension. Not to be so radicalized might be the worse sin.

This second trip provided the material for The Motorcycle Diaries . It's a slight but charming book, alternating breathless bursts of social zeal with lyrical sensitivity and catty portraits of the locals. The young Che comes across as something of a feckless social climber, good at buttering up useful people, ever ready to drop the family name, charming but also socially ruthless. He's part stereotypical shallow Argentine playboy, part budding Errol Flynn.

All of Guevara's books seem to come with sheaves of photographs, as if everything in his life were constantly being prepared for mythology. And in these, we see Che as he probably was: a pretty, convivial, quick-tongued Latin American prince off on a peripatetic lark. He sizes up people according to whether they are "useful" or not; he badgers his mother for supplies of mate tea. Aside from small-town networking, Che's two principal interests are mines and archaeological sites.

Perhaps the most famous declaration of the young Che comes from a letter he wrote from Costa Rica to his aunt Beatriz:

I traversed the vast dominions of United Fruit. Once more I was able to convince myself how criminal the capitalistic octopuses are. On a picture of our old and bewailed Comrade Stalin, I swore not to rest before the capitalistic octopuses are destroyed.

But it was Che's journey to Guatemala in 1953 that would ultimately provide him with his road-to-Damascus moment. The following year, he witnessed firsthand the C.I.A.-backed coup that toppled the country's Socialist president, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, and replaced him with the more amenable Carlos Castillo Armas. For Che, the 1954 coup was a crucial event-a symptomatic intervention by the U.S . government to protect the interests of American companies, in this case the dreaded United Fruit. Fleeing to Mexico in the coup's aftermath, Che met a young student gangster named Fidel Castro and quickly talked his way into being the medical officer for Mr. Castro's 1956 invasion of Cuba aboard the Granma . His transformation from roaming medical student into guerrilla was swiftly completed.

Of course, it was Che's role in the Cuban Revolution that turned him into the poster boy we all know. But it was a quixotic participation in many ways. Che was known inside the revolution as a strict disciplinarian, ready to sign death warrants and mete out sundry brutalities. And yet, for all that, he was spectacularly ineffective. From 1961 to 1965, Che was Cuba's Minister for Industries; before that, from 1959 to 1961, he was the head of the national bank. Both stints ended in farce. A Cuban expedition to Congo to prop up the anti-Mobutu forces fighting there ended similarly. Che, in fact, failed at anything requiring real ability and perseverance. He was a charismatic dilettante, like most professional revolutionaries, but in between he lived the activist high life: the Bandung-generation Third World conference circuit, dramatic speeches at the United Nations, clandestine peregrinations from country to country, murky deals, love affairs and connections in high places. None of it amounted to anything, however. In the end, Che had to foment real revolutions or nothing. And so, in the ultimate tilt at windmills, he set off in 1966 to start one in Bolivia.

It was yet another fiasco, but this time one that cost him his life. After a disastrous Keystone Kops campaign in the foothills of the Andes, his little band was cornered by a Ranger Battalion of the Bolivian Army near the town of Vallegrande on Oct. 8, 1967. Che was summarily executed the next day. His body was then publicly displayed on a laundry sink, providing him with his last and most provocative photo op.

The Dreary Language of Revolutionaries

But the sex appeal of dubious, semi-fraudulent characters like Che and Castro goes beyond images-if not very far beyond. It's clear that Cuba, the society they manufactured together, is as oppressive and miserable as any on earth. But we seem not to care. Or, at least, our filmmakers seem not to care. They can latch onto a rhetoric of "social justice," ever vague and undefined. After all, as Jane Fonda once said, "To be a revolutionary, you have to be a human being. You have to care about other people." That's sexy. But what about Che's genuflections to Comrade Stalin? A bit less sexy. He once signed a letter "Stalin II." Will that be in the movie? Probably not.

Mr. Salles is actually sorely mistaken in thinking of Che as something "indigenous." His thought was a hackneyed rip-off of the European revolutionary tradition, about as indigenous as the East German notebooks he wrote his Bolivian diaries in. Guevara's early Stalinism had implications for his lifelong public attitudes and actions. What appealed to him in Marx, Stalin and the young Mussolini, after all, was a strain of visionary apocalypse, of globalized conflict, which effortlessly opened the door to jejune gangsterism.

As it is, the language of revolutionaries, from Lenin to Osama bin Laden, with its metaphors of weaponry, trenches and assaults, is as dreary in Che's bad prose as it is anywhere else. Here, for example, is Che's Tricontinental Speech of 1965:

Our every action is a battle cry against imperialism, and a battle hymn for the people's unity against the great enemy of mankind: the United States of America. Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this, our battle cry, may have reached some receptive ear, and another hand may be extended to wield our weapons, and other men be ready to intone our funeral dirge with the staccato singing of the machine guns and new battle cries of war and victory.

It's pure, derivative Lenin.

At Home on a Bottle of Vodka

Then again, we are constantly being told what a shame it is that Che's idealism and seriousness are being corrupted by capitalist merchandising and Hollywood makeovers. A recent piece in The Guardian by Zoe Williams lamented the crassness of Madonna's hijacking of Che's "epic human vision."

But Che flirted with the media from Day 1. The so-called "guerrilla war" that toppled Batista was as much a media event as anything else. Afterward, Che admitted in a moment of candor that "the presence of a foreign journalist, American for preference, was more important to us than a military victory." Both Castro and Che were lionized in the Western press, and they were perhaps as much deluded by it as they were by Marxist-Leninist dogma. In any case, miniseries and refrigerator magnets are hardly betrayals of either man: Alas, they are entirely appropriate incarnations of both. Che belongs on a bottle of vodka.

And herein lie the seeds of Che's own destruction in Bolivia. He wanted to create "a hundred Vietnams" all over the continent, beginning with Bolivia. If a few thousand Bolivian peasants died in the process, well, you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs, as thugs always say. Bolivia was a suitable place for launching the continental revolution because, as Che and Castro saw it, its cities and its mining centers were ripe for revolt. What the Cubans hadn't bargained for, however, was that the Bolivians didn't want a Cuban Revolution. Who can blame them? Men like Che don't build happy societies.

In fact, Bolivians had their own Revolucion Nacional , which began in 1952. It was one of the few genuinely popular uprisings in Latin American history (no Hollywood films planned on that one, though), and, by 1964, it had produced the wily, Quechua-speaking Bolivian president, René Barrientos. The poster boy from Rosario and his band of foreigners stood no chance. Besides, the Bolivian Army spent most of its time building roads in rural areas and was therefore actually popular with the peasantry. Che was furious-and dumbfounded-that they actively preferred the army to his merry band of insurgents.

But in the end, perhaps the most fitting epitaph for Che will not be provided by his cinematic admirers and pop-culture sycophants. Gen. Jeannot Ruharara served with Che during the Congo war in 1965; he's still a member of a roaming, pointless, gun-toting guerrilla band called the Mayi-Mayi in Congo. In a recent interview with The Independent newspaper, General Ruharara remembered Che. "We used to call him Ernesto," he recalled fondly. "A giant of a man. Big, thick hair. Smoked a lot. Guevara taught us a lot. We hope he can come back to help us someday."

Lawrence Osborne is the author of Paris Dreambook and American Normal . His book The Accidental Connoisseur will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2004.