Rendez-vous à La Havane

A nice trip to Cuba in the waning days of Fulgencio Batista was as good an excuse as any for John Cassavetes, Sara Shane, and Raymond Burr to make Affair In Havana. The title is a bit of a misnomer as most of the action takes place in the area in and around Raymond Burr's estate on the northern shore.

The Batista administration was making an effort to attract movie companies to film in Cuba. This same year Errol Flynn did The Big Boodle, also entirely shot on location there. Affair In Havana has a bit more going for it.

Raymond Burr is a paralyzed wealthy industrialist who is married to the beautiful Sara Shane who was crippled in a boating accident. Implied is that a very important love muscle doesn't work also. Without the Code that would be more explicit. So the voluptuous Shane takes her pleasures where she finds them and currently she finds them in jazz pianist John Cassavetes.

Burr knows all about it and he gets Cassavetes to the estate where everything pops.

Color might have been nice for Affair In Havana to emphasize the lush greens of the tropics.

Burr's performance was interesting I could have seen him being wheeled in to that meeting that Michael Corleone and Hyman Roth had with those other business tycoons in The Godfather, Part II.

As for the story, think of W. Somerset Maugham's The Letter and you will know how it comes out.

An admirable example of truth in labelling, Affair In Havana is about just that. True, a couple of violent deaths result, but they're both crimes of passion, not the end-products of a typical thriller plot. Affair in Havana, in fact, resembles nothing so much as a swift, steamy verismo opera, albeit one set to a Cu-Bop score.

This is the pre-Castro Cuba whose final days were so vividly summoned in The Godfather, Part II: Fulgencio Batista's venal, wide-open playground for wealthy Americans (the movie was filmed, by Laszlo Benedek, entirely on location).

At the airport, sugar-cane tycoon Raymond Burr, confined to a wheelchair and sporting a platinum buzz-cut, deplanes with his young wife (Sara Shane, who's again called Lorna, as she was the year before in Three Bad Sisters; judging by her performance here, she probably couldn't be counted on to remember yet another name). Instead of heading out to Burr's baronial estate in the mountains, they dine at a Havana club where the high-strung jazz pianist (John Cassavettes) strikes Burr's fancy and so gets invited over to the table. He seems uneasy, as does Shane, which is understandable, since they've been carrying on a clandestine affair whenever she's in town. Nonetheless, Cassavettes accepts Burr's invitation to stay at the country place and play at his annual `fiesta.' There the points of the triangle spend suffocating, white-knuckle evenings sipping demitasses while Burr plays his tapes of native music at ear-splitting volume.

With, for the bulk of the movie, only the three principal characters on screen, Affair in Havana stays tense and claustrophobic. This works only to a point beyond which It needs, however, something more in the way of incident and background.

Burr seems to hold his wife responsible for an accident that caused his paralysis, but what happened is never revealed; He has also retained a private detective to take film of the illicit lovers, but we don't know what provoked him to do so, or when he first learned of her infidelity (was his asking Cassavettes to join them innocent or disingenuous?); And Burr's chauffeur/valet seems dog-loyal to Shane, smitten in fact, but we never learn why. So when the plot threads converge in the final few minutes, it's not so much startling as abrupt. Most of the movie doesn't prepare us for the end, leading us to wonder, Did the production suddenly run short of pesos?

Pre-Ironside has white-haired Raymond Burr in a wheelchair as Mallabee, a sugar cane tycoon living in Havana. He arrives home from the states to be greeted by his stunning young wife Lorna (Sara Shane) who doesn't seem particularly happy to see him.

Mallabee insists on going to a particular club for dinner though she is reluctant. One of the club musicians is Nick (John Cassavetes) whom Mallabee invites to his table after hearing him play piano.

Well, if you don't want someone to know you are involved in a clandestine affair with a man's wife, this awkward meeting with subtext flying all over the place just isn't the way to do it. Nick refuses an invitation to come to a fiesta on Mallabee's plantation and doesn't answer questions about himself.

Once back home, we learn that Mallabee will give Lorna a divorce but no money, so she can't leave him.

Nick does show up for the fiesta and, realizing Mallabee is in a wheelchair wants to break it off with the unhappy Lorna. She gives Nick the excuse that she's responsible for the accident. We never find out what happened.

Of course Mallabee knows all about the affair and has had a detective following them, with film to prove it.

The big problem with this film for me was the performance of Shane. The character is manipulative and takes advantage of the affection one of the plantation workers has for her, and she's also not completely honest with Nick. She does not give this role enough depth, making her less central to the story and thus the ending.

Filmed entirely in Cuba.

Well-made but inconsequential triangle drama, with Raymond Burr playing a brooding, resentful industrialist who may or may not be a terminal case -- resentments are directed primarily at wife Sara Shane, who was responsible for crippling him in a boating accident. (To correct another comment here, it is clearly a boating accident that crippled Burr, as revealed in a tense sequence on the water in which Burr nearly rams the boat carrying him, John Cassavettes, and Shane into some rocks.)

Cassavettes, a jazz pianist scraping out a living at a local watering hole, spends the bulk of the movie trying to untangle from Shane's web of sexual come-ons and neediness, something his character has difficulty with. Burr makes a complex villain/protagonist, filling in his angry cuckolded husband with numerous human qualities that earn audience sympathy. Unlike the claims of an earlier comment, the relationship between Shane and the loyal Cuban servant Valdes is not a mystery. Rather, unlike how current movies might handle such a plot device, the adultery of Shane is always implicit and not explicit. A suggestive and violent scene on the ocean beach reveals their relationship within the boundaries of 1957 censorship -- if this film were remade today, that scene would be excessively sexual and heavy.

The movie's ending is not atypical of programmer features of the era, as Cassavettes nods, returns to his piano -- as in "the show must go on" -- and soldiers on, finally shed of both Shane and the tawdriness that surrounded their relationship. The rushed finale suggests, for him, the best of all possible worlds.