Club Havana

The young French critics, many of whom were destined to become directors, were the first to recognize the superior work of the Austria-Hungarian born Edgar Ulmer who called himself "the Frank Capra of PRC," the notorious low-budget Hollywood studio that churned out Westerns and programmers by the dozens on budgets that never exceeded 100,000 dollars. Unlike the average hack director stuck in Poverty Row, Ulmer always surprises us; he makes the best of his limited resources, moving the camera and inventing ingenious business to keep the second-rate scripts he was handed to direct moving. This 1945 film, set solely in a Cuban nightclub in Miami, features a cast of familiar faces, many of whom never really made it the top but always turned in professional performances, among them the beautiful ingénue Dorothy Morris, the sinister Marc Lawrence, and the ever-dependable, lady-like Margaret Lindsay. Tom Neal comes and goes while most of the other men in the story, including the police, all wear pencil mustaches then in fashion. In between the predictable Grand Hotel story-line, you'll hear many famous Latin-American songs sung competently by tiny Lita Baron, then billing herself as Isabelita. Given only 62 minutes running time to pull all the drama and music together, Ulmer does not disappoint us. His fans always wonder what might have happened to him had he had bigger budgets and better scripts like his contemporary at Warner Bros.,Michael Curtiz. We'll never know.