Club Havana
                     
Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Year:  1945
Rating: 6.5
The Latin music plays gently in the Club Havana where couples go for a night of romance, champagne, dancing and occasionally bittersweet breakups. A classy club where reservation are de rigueur and the Maître d' knows everyone by name and by reputation. Where attractive girls walk about the floor selling cigarettes and smiles. Where the powder room is filled with gossip, hopes and suicidal thoughts. This Poverty Row production (PRC) was made in four days and on less than a shoestring budget all being shot on one set and apparently without a script for the actors to read - but somehow the director Edgar G. Ulmer pulls it off and delivers a bit of a hidden gem. It probably seems better now than it did back when it was released but that could be said of a lot of Ulmer's films.



Though he started off big after coming to America from Vienna with Murnau in 1926 and worked his way up to directing for Universal - where he made the great The Black Cat - but soon after he fell in love with the wrong woman and was blacklisted by the owner Carl Laemmle. First he did what were termed ethnic films - ie Yiddish and then for years low budget films for PRC and later made some films in Europe. His film Detour made at PRC is now considered by some critics to be a classic and some of his other works are held in good esteem for the style he brought to them.



He didn't have much time to do that for this film as he was brought in at the last minute to direct when the initial director had to drop out but he manages to make a 60 minute film full of music and drama. The film billed itself as the Grand Hotel of PRC and to some degree that is true but clearly without the stars that filled that film up. Some of the names and faces here are recognizable but certainly no big stars. The entire film takes place in one evening and focuses on various characters and the drama in their lives as they sit in the Club Havana (which clearly is not set in Havana). There is the killer (Marc Lawrence) who has gotten out of jail on a phony alibi, the piano player who knows it is a phony alibi, the hitman that is brought in to shut him up with a bullet, a woman (Margaret Lindsay) just arrived from a divorce in Reno only to find out that the man (Donald Douglas) she divorced to marry isn't so interested any longer, a couple out on their first date (Tom Neal - the star in The Detour - and Dorothy Morris), an older couple reconciling with barbed wire and a wealthy woman (Renie Riano) and her three children who are looking for husband number four.



Mixed in with all this cutting back and forth are a number of musical numbers from the band - two well known ones Besame Mucho and Tico Tico by Lita Baron, a well known club singer at the time. The film manages to have a fair amount of snappy dialogue - "You have to marry that guy so then you can forget about him"; "these guys think a quarter tip allows them to play chiropractor with you"; "My new husband is stupid but he matches my early American furniture". Not bad for a film without a script. This is up on YouTube.