Santiago

I admit that this film is far from great, but it is entertaining enough to get you through a rainy night. Alan Ladd has good on screen chemistry with Lloyd Nolan and the two off screen friends play well off each other. Again, they are not Redford and Newman, but they both give a decent enough performance. So, if you are a fan of Alan Ladd, you will find this easily forgetful film decent entertainment. If not, you haven't lost much.

Even as a 9-year old in 1956, looking up at the screen in a suburban Sydney theatre on a Saturday afternoon, I knew "Santiago" was lacklustre.

Set during the 1898 Cuban revolution against Spain, enemies and gunrunners Cash Adams (Alan Ladd) and Clay Pike (Lloyd Nolan) join forces to ship guns to the rebels. However "Santiago" had the same predictable formula of many an Alan Ladd film at the time. Although they opened with an action sequence, they soon settled into an interminable gabfest while Ladd's character (usually embittered by something) sorted out the romantic situation with the girl in the movie - Rosanna Podestà in this case.

Rosanna had just launched a thousand ships as Helen in "Helen of Troy" (still a favourite). Apparently she couldn't speak English and learned her lines by rote for that movie. In "Santiago" she may have been dubbed; her voice has a rather detached quality.

The novel element in "Santiago" is that the guns are being taken to Cuba on a Mississippi paddle steamer captained by 'Sidewheel' Jones (Chill Wills). In those days, Alan Ladd and Chill Wills were actors I knew better than Laurence Olivier or Marlon Brando.

It didn't take a particularly demanding critic to see that the interiors and much else in "Santiago" were filmed in a flat, artless manner, more or less matching the story.

The movie came to life a little at the end with a shootout between Cash and Clay Pike (who homages Burt Lancaster's death scene in the much better "Vera Cruz").

Incidentally, the Spanish soldiers in "Santiago" are cast in pretty much the same role as the stormtroopers in "Star Wars"; cannon fodder for Cash, Clay and Co. They get taken down so easily by flying knives and bullets that they hardly project any sense of menace at all.

At those Saturday afternoon matinees, I caught Alan Ladd at the tail end of his career. Now I can appreciate his work more objectively. Good as he was in "This Gun for Hire" and "Shane" he was just about perfect in "The Great Gatsby". It seems he was a nice guy and loyal. Decades later, his movies always remind me of those much-anticipated afternoons at the 'pictures' even if expectations weren't always met.

Adventure movie which has some good moments but it's absurd most times. Alan Ladd and Lloyd Nolan are two rival dealers, trying to sell guns for rebels who fight against the Spanish domain in Cuba. Of course, between them there is a girl, a rebel leader played by Italian actress Rossana Podesta. That's she who has the movie's most brilliant line. Ladd sees a group of rebels dancing the conga (or some kind of dance identified as conga) and ask Rossana how could they be happy in such situation. She says something like "because the hatred is in their souls but not in their hearts" !!! And she also has an annoying kid brother. Sorry but I can't recommend this movie.

Santiago was one of those routine action adventure programmers that Alan Ladd's agent Sue Carol insisted on casting him instead of letting him gradually transition to character roles. But when you're married to the agent and as agreeable a fellow as Ladd apparently was during his life you can't turn your agent down so easily.

This is one of the few American made films that deals with the Cuban rebellion as opposed to the Spanish-American War, not that there are that many that deal with it. The setting is Cuba in 1895 and the island which did not choose to participate in the general revolt against colonial Spain is finally getting tired of being a colony.

The plot concerns two American gun runners, Alan Ladd and Lloyd Nolan who hate each other both looking to sell guns to the Cuban rebels for cash on the barrel-head. To collect they have to go to Cuba with the delivery.

Along for the ride is Rosanna Podesta who is a Cuban patriot and both men are interested in her, Nolan quite cynical and open about it. It all doesn't make for a pleasant voyage to Cuba aboard Captain Chill Wills's old Mississippi steamboat used for transportation.

When they're on Lloyd Nolan and Chill Wills dominate the film. Nolan who never gave a bad performance on the big or small screen is a really thoroughly rotten human being. Ladd and he have quite a bit of history between them and Ladd has excellent reason to hate his guts.

No player on the planet was ever safe from Chill Wills's scene stealing antics especially as he got older and honed that particular aspect of his craft to perfection. Wills understudied Humphrey Bogart from The African Queen on how to pilot this drunken riverboat captain through the film. In a better film the Academy might have noticed this character.

Lots of action comes hard and fast in Santiago. The film is nicely paced and should appeal to fans of that genre and of the players involved.

The problem is that the heroes are supposedly fighting for the Cuban cause (against the Spanish invaders) but Cuba fell into American hands the same year;it would have been acceptable if Cash had remained an arms dealer ,just working for .....cash;but he tries to redeem himself,he's got a high moral conscience :he was a military man and he could never get over his shame,his demotion.His sense of honor is still intact and when he meets the beautiful Isabella,the rebels' Passionaria ,he is ripe for rehabilitation.

If you forget history-and the "cultural"lines at the beginning-you have a watchable adventures movie which begins as a western ,continues as some kind of pirate tale and ends with a long walk through the jungle.

As for Ladd,he did much worse than that :" guns of the Timberland" and mainly "Orazio e Curiazo " in which he plays like a zombie.