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.
