by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Pier 5, Havana was
quite a different kettle of fish politically: I had wanted to watch it largely
on the strength of the TCM synopsis: “An American in
Cuba tries to thwart a bombing plot aimed at Castro.” Made in 1959, just after
the Cuban revolution succeeded and Fidel Castro took over — driving out the
kleptocratic U.S.-supported dictator Fulgencio Batista — Pier 5, Havana
sounded from that synopsis that the filmmakers were portraying Castro and his
revolutionary government as the good guys and the Batistanos who were trying to stage a counter-revolution and retake
control as the bad guys — and the original poster for the film, reproduced on
its imdb.com page, made it clear that that was exactly their intent. The poster
advertised the movie as “The Screen’s First Bombshell Out of Newly-Freed Cuba!”
This was, of course, before the U.S. party line changed dramatically and Fidel
Castro became at least the third most terrible man in the world (after
Khrushchev and Mao), and instead of welcoming his revolution we imposed an
embargo on the island that has lasted to this day (albeit with occasional
modifications) and which has provided Fidel and his brother and successor, Raúl
Castro, with a ready-made excuse every time anything goes wrong with the Cuban
economy. Aside from the novelty of its politics, Pier 5, Havana is a pretty ordinary late-noir thriller, though with at least two improvements over Hong
Kong Confidential: Cameron Mitchell, its
star, is a considerably better actor than Gene Barry, and he gets to deliver
the narration himself in first-person,
thanks to the screenwriter’s (Robert E. Kent himself, under the pseudonym
“James B. Gordon,” adapting a story by Joseph Hoffman) decision to use that
classic noir device to get us closer to
the central character.
Mitchell plays Steve Daggett, world-weary adventurer who
finds himself in Havana and is almost immediately asked to leave by several
people close to a mysterious plot centering around a speedboat workshop owned
by a mysterious character named Schluss. It’s annoying that the name is
pronounced similarly to “slush” instead of the long double-“o” sound that “u”
would have in German, and it’s even more annoying that the actor who plays him,
Otto Waldis, can’t seem to make up his mind whether to channel Erich von
Stroheim or S. Z. Sakall. Daggett eventually discovers that the factory is a
front for a planned terrorist attack on key locations throughout Cuba (the
giveaway is a map of the island with all the targets circled), and working
together, he and the Cuban police official Lt. Garcia (Michael Granger, who
despite his Anglo name is actually quite convincing as a Latino) uncover the
plot and trace it to Fernando Ricardo (Eduardo Noriega), whom Daggett’s
girlfriend Monica Gray (Allison Hayes) had left him for years earlier because
Fernando was a sweeter sugar daddy than Daggett could ever be. (At least there
isn’t a female rival for Daggett’s affections the way there for Reed in Hong
Kong Confidential — the jealousy schtick in that movie really weighted it down.) Oddly, though Pier
5, Havana is thematically more noir than Hong
Kong Confidential, it’s considerably
plainer and less atmospheric visually; the cinematographer, Maury Gertsman, simply
doesn’t shoot this film (especially the action scenes) with the power of Kenneth
Peach’s work in Hong Kong Confidential.
Also, Cuba was largely “played” by Santa Monica, and in a bit of sloppiness the
editor (uncredited on imdb.com, for pretty obvious reasons) left in a short
glimpse of the famous sign at the entrance to the Santa Monica pier, which not
only identifies it as such but is, of course, in English.
Pier 5,
Havana was out of circulation for decades,
and an imdb.com contributor mentioned the rumor that when the U.S.’s official
policy towards Castro’s Cuba became relentless opposition and a blockade in
hopes it would bring down Castro’s government (so much so that Castro requested
“defensive” missiles from the Soviet Union, and a reluctant Khrushchev
complied, leading to the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 and Khrushchev’s
removal of the missiles in exchange for U.S. assurances that they wound never
again attempt a covert operation to remove Castro the way they had at the Bay
of Pigs in 1961), the government bought up the negative and all prints of this
movie to have it suppressed. That turned out to be untrue — United Artists
merely withdrew it from distribution once it became “politically incorrect” and
it’s only now slipped back into circulation courtesy of TCM, which has shown
packages of Edward Cahn’s 1950’s “B”’s before (I remember on their last
go-round, during which they actually named Cahn “Director of the Month,” one
they ran called The Music Box Kid,
which was quite exciting even though it was a pretty ordinary 1920’s-period
gangster tale — the title refers to a young Mob hit man who nicknames his
Thompson submachine gun his “music box”). Like most of them, Pier 5,
Havana is a workmanlike but unoriginal
movie — but still it’s nice to know that for one brief shining moment it was
actually possible for a Hollywood studio to make a movie in which the Castro
government of Cuba was on the side of good and the bad guys were the Right-wing
terrorists trying to overthrow it!
