Club Havana

There's plenty of bang for the buck in Club Havana. This low rent Grand Hotel featuring a variety of Latin musical interludes with a plot unfolding at nearly every table offers a lot of entertainment in its brief running time by hardly taking a breath. Comic, romantic, suspenseful, it juggles storylines with a fair share of sardonically written observations involving characters at crucial crossroad in their lives. Featuring a variety of moods an emotions, the buoyant rhumba infused film is a disturbing entertainment culminating in a jarring finale.

Directed by Edgar Ulmer who does amazing things with little money and little time as he manages the plot, does some interesting silhouette and other camera work to deal with budget issues while getting serviceable performances from his entire cast. Rene Riano as multi-millionairess Mrs. Cavendish, with children in tow, simply steals the film as she cynically lays out her proposition to a man in need of a loan.

Club Havana is a fine floor show.

Edgar G. Ulmer was used to far, far lower budgets than he had to play with on this inconsequential little bonbon, and saw to it that what little money was available to him was up there on the screen as his camera glided about Edward C. Jewell's night club set creating a reasonably plush and atmospheric mixture of melodrama and latin song & dance.

The film also benefits from an interesting cast of familiar faces with Marc Lawrence supplying the menace, Rene Riano supplying cynical wit as a merry serial divorcee and Sonia Sorel in a vivid cameo as the film's blonde sacrificial lamb. Although top-billed and famed for his role in Ulmer's 'Detour', however, Tom Neal is hardly in it.

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.

People are being way too hard on this little gem that is available for viewing on youtube. They remind me of Roger Ebert comparing every film ever made to "Casablanca" and that takes the fun out of movies.Relax and enjoy this glossy looking cheapie, although if you are a Tom neal fan as am I -- he is only onscreen for perhaps 10 minutes. He probably came in one morning and shot his scenes and close ups before lunch and then split. hit the gym and then the bar and Ms.Payton. The music is an added plus - a must see for B Movie fans all in all, a neat little film.

Whether by chance or providential design, Edgar G. Ulmer's definitive rumination on fate - otherwise known as Detour (1945) - has slowly etched itself into the minds of film lovers around the world as one as one of the quintessential b-movie noirs of its day.

Bolstered by similar musings and patched together at about the same time, Club Havana (1945) amounts to little more than a trifle. A story is concocted out of nowhere and, once over, dissipates back into nothing. But that's part of its charm. In draining a Grand Hotel (1932)-type scenario of a budget as well as a purpose, the film acquires a strong offhand flavour that legitimises the whole ordeal. Low-budget-friendly aggravations of sadness, solitude and regret hover over the set as individual stories coalesce into an abstract whole. Talking leads into music and back into talking. The top-billed Tom Neal is diluted into the narrative and what little there is of a plot through-line emerges elsewhere - and why not?

Ulmer knew how to breathe life into an obviously vacant affair and have a lot of fun in the process. Club Havana may not be Exhibit A (nor B, nor C...) of this refreshing trait, but it's certainly one to consider down the road.