Affair in Trinidad (Beckworth, Columbia, 1952)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

During my comments on the film Born Yesterday, I referenced that Rita Hayworth was originally offered the part of Billie Dawn in the movie, but at the time she was married to Muslim leader Aly Khan and she wasn’t interested in working. When she and Aly Khan broke up Hayworth was ready to return to work, so Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn threw this project together. My husband Charles and I watched it together in 2007, one year before I launched this movie blog. So I offer my comments about it now.

My husband Charles finally got home at 9 and I managed to screen a movie for us, Affair in Trinidad, a hastily put-together Rita Hayworth vehicle from Columbia in 1952 — she’d just divorced Prince Aly Khan and wanted to get back to work, and Columbia president Harry Cohn was only too glad to oblige her. The two of them formed a paper production company called Beckworth (named after Hayworth and her daughter, Rebecca Welles) that was basically a tax dodge so Hayworth’s pay for the film could be treated as capital gains rather than salary, and Cohn threw together a project that would blend themes from Rita’s previous hits: an exotic location, criminal intrigue, plenty of noir atmosphere and Glenn Ford, her leading man from Gilda six years earlier. Cohn even got Virginia Van Upp, who’d written the original story for Gilda, to do one for this project as well, though at least three other writers were credited (Berne Giler as co-author with Van Upp of the story and James Gunn and Oscar Saul with the script) and what emerges is a barely coherent narrative that’s a pastiche of other movies, not only Gilda and Notorious (mentioned as an obvious model for the plot in Robert Osborne’s intro) but Casablanca (much of the action centers around a nightclub where Hayworth’s character entertains) and even Rain (an atmospheric sequence of a sudden rainstorm in what’s otherwise a sunny Caribbean clime, though it did offer a premonition of the actual Rain remake, Miss Sadie Thompson, Hayworth would do the next year).

At the start of the film an American artist, Neal Emery (imdb.com credits Ross Elliott with playing his corpse even though we don’t get to see him as anything recognizable as a human being, dead or alive), is found dead in a boat on the docks of Port of Spain, capital of Trinidad (which was still a British colony when this was filmed in 1952; it was granted independence 10 years later). His death is initially ruled a suicide but, of course, it was only faked to look like a suicide; he was really murdered by — we find out reels later — a gang of international spies headed by Max Fabian (Alexander Scourby) — and yes, it’s jarring to have the principal villain have the same name as the theatrical producer Gregory Ratoff had played in All About Eve just two years before, who in association with German refugees Franz and Veronica Huebling (George Voskovec and Valerie Bettis) and someone of vaguely Slavic nationality named Peter Bronec (Walter Kohler), is plotting to smuggle in a sophisticated ballistic missile system into Trinidad that can strike any city in the U.S. on behalf of a certain sinister foreign power which is kept nameless (not that an audience in 1952 would have had any trouble figuring out who was really meant!). Hayworth plays the murdered man’s wife, Chris Emery, star entertainer at the Caribé nightclub, and the implication is that she was selling herself sexually to Fabian in exchange for him buying her husband’s paintings at inflated prices — and the authorities, Inspector Smythe (Torin Thatcher), head of the Trinidad police, and U.S. consul Anderson (Howard Wendell), decide to ask Our Heroine to continue her affair with Fabian in order to get close enough to him to find out what he’s plotting and who he’s plotting it with.

So where does Glenn Ford fit into this film? He plays the murdered man’s brother, Steve Emery, and plays him in an almost monochrome manner of sheer boorish hatred of just about everybody he comes in contact with. There’s no hint in his portrayal of the surprising degree of weakness he showed in his role in Gilda (in which at times he seemed like the boy toy of both Hayworth’s and George Macready’s characters), and through a totally arbitrary bit of plotting he’s supposed to be kept in the dark about Chris’s true relationship with Fabian until Smythe and Anderson decide whether or not he’s involved in Fabian’s plot himself. Robert Osborne said at the beginning that he thought Hayworth looked weak throughout the film and lacking in her former self-confidence except during her two big song-and-dance numbers (with Jo Ann Greer as her voice double) — which is probably why the writers actually introduce her in a hot performance at the Caribé, in which she gets to go chica-chica-boom a lot: it’s a good number but it falls a bit flat today because Marilyn Monroe did an even better version of the same concept to Irving Berlin’s “Heat Wave” in There’s No Business Like Show Business two years later (and in color, whereas this film is in black-and-white). Affair in Trinidad is strongest in its evocation of the noir atmosphere — at times Joseph Walker’s cinematography is so dark that you have to wait for the close-ups to tell the white and Black characters apart (and it seems odd that The Film Noir Encyclopedia relegated this film to its appendix whereas a lot of other, much less integrally noir films made it to listings in the main text) and the marvelous performance by Juanita Moore as Dominique, Chris’s maidservant and the voice of reason through much of the film (at one point she tells Chris, “It is the prerogative of a faithful and loyal servant to be impertinent”).

Its weakest point is a script that makes very little sense and the direction by Vincent Sherman; it occurred to me that the reason Rita looked weak in much of the film was that Sherman wasn’t used to handling a female star who needed to be coaxed into a good performance. At the time he was best known for his vehicles for Bette Davis and Joan Crawford at Warners, and both Davis and Crawford were well known as actresses who knew very well what worked for them (and what didn’t), and basically turned it on and gave a performance no matter what they were getting from the director. (Occasionally they got directors who turned them down a bit and thereby made them even more effective — William Wyler for Davis and George Cukor for Crawford — but those films were few and far between.) In her entire career Hayworth only once got to make a film with a truly great director — her ex-husband Orson Welles in The Lady from Shanghai (which, like Gilda and Affair in Trinidad, puts Hayworth’s character at the apex of a romantic triangle with a poor but basically decent man and a sinister rich one), a story which makes even less sense than Affair but has Welles’ atmospheric direction and his Hitchcockian remodeling of her (short hair, blonde dye, imperturbable manner) to compensate. Sherman, able to turn on self-starting stars like Davis and Crawford, has no idea how to challenge Hayworth to give of her best, so instead of the electrifying performance she gives in Charles Vidor’s Gilda she just goes through the motions here, playing some scenes with riveting power (like the one in which Anderson comes to her dressing room and she mistakes him for an audience member who’s trying to pick her up, tearing into him and giving him all her well-honed lines of refusal) and just walking through others.

It also doesn’t help that we get Glenn Ford in a role that cries out for Humphrey Bogart (who was already working at Columbia and had been since 1949, when he’d renegotiated his Warners contract to be nonexclusive); instead of the world-weary cynicism Bogart or Robert Mitchum would have brought to the role, Ford acts with an aggressiveness that makes him so unlikable from reel one it’s hard to keep remembering he’s supposed to be the hero. Affair in Trinidad is a pretty good movie, all things considered (though the climax with Hayworth in the secret guest room where the baddies have stored all their rocket plans is laughable compared to the cellar scene in Notorious that was its pretty obvious inspiration; nor does the film have the contentious sexual politics of Notorious — and Gilda, for that matter — in which a previous relationship between hero and heroine added welcome complexity to the emotional intrigue), and it achieved its purpose of making tons of money for Columbia from audiences desperate to see Rita Hayworth in anything after she’d been off the screen for four years, but it’s a disappointing film in that it could have been so much better; indeed, virtually everything in it was done better in some other movie!