Desperado is a 1995 American neo-Western action film written, produced, and directed by Robert Rodriguez. It is the second part of Rodriguez’s Mexico Trilogy. It stars Antonio Banderas as El Mariachi who seeks revenge on the drug lord who killed his lover. The film was screened out of competition at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival. Desperado grossed $58 million worldwide. The film has been seen as Salma Hayek’s breakout role.
After it was submitted to the Motion Picture Association of America, the film was granted an NC-17 due to graphic violence and it had to be severely cut for an R rating.
Among the scenes that were trimmed are the deaths of Tarantino’s character and his friend at the bar, as well as Trejo’s character. By far the most major excision came at the end of the film, which originally contained a large-scale shootout between El Mariachi, Carolina, Bucho, and his thugs at Bucho’s mansion.
Owing to the amount of footage the MPAA demanded be removed from the scene, Rodriguez elected to remove the sequence in its entirety, giving the film its current fade-out ending. Two additional scenes were also deleted featuring the codpiece gun (seen in the guitar case). Originally, the gun was used by El Mariachi during the second bar shootout when
he uses it to shoot the first thug before whipping out his pistols from his sleeves and finishing him off. In a second deleted scene, the crotch gun was to go off accidentally while Banderas is in bed with Hayek, blowing a hole through the guitar while they were playing it. The gun was eventually used in unrelated Rodriguez’s films From Dusk till Dawn and Machete Kills.