Build a wall. A really high wall. And make Cuba pay for it. How times have changed. US Immigration is on full alert because America is being invaded by a caravan from Cuba. A six person caravan. Every few weeks an organization in Cuba sends a plane with a handful of people to sneak into the country. If they had only waited ten years they would have been welcomed to the USA. But this is 1950 and Fidel is still a lawyer in Havana trying to help the poor and Batista was out of power living in the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. One of my favorite aspects of the film are the scenes shot in Havana - what a lovely Spanish city with wide boulevards, town squares, looming edificios and music being played everywhere. I have always wanted to go to Havana but the Havana of the 1950's.


An agent (John Hodiak) of the Immigration Department - now known as ICE - goes undercover to Havana pretending to be a Hungarian refugee willing to pay to get to the land of freedom. He is quickly connected to a human trafficker - played by the always rotten George Macready - but this isn't the smartest agent around as he leaves his police I.D. in his wallet. Oops. He also falls hard for a dame. One of the women trying to get to America also. And when ICE meets heat, it melts. Especially when the heat is being generated by Hedy Lamarr.


Lamarr knew about being a refugee having skipped town and her husband when the Nazi's came to power and her husband was a Heil Hitler sort of guy. Being Jewish she did not approve. She had been a star in German cinema but one night she just vamoosed and ended up in Hollywood where she was signed to MGM. She went on to become one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood though she made a few bad decisions - turning down both Casablanca and Gaslight thus helping Ingrid Bergman quite a bit. She also sold zillions of dollars worth of War Bonds during the war and did some inventing that has to do with wire-less that was hugely important. So she was beautiful, brave, freedom loving and a genius. She should be on Mount Rushmore as far as I am concerned.


The film has a bit of a Casablanca vibe - she was in Buchenwald - ends up stateless in Cuba - and just wants to be free - Hodiak falls for her but he has his duty to perform - what is an ICE agent to do? He tracks her through the Everglades like any red-blooded American boy would and tells her "how could this country deny entry to someone as brave as you". Let me tell you the ways. If the current caravan only had Hedy Lamarr in it, the ICE agents would just step aside.