| | Following the 1948 one-two punch of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Key Largo, and before hitting the halcyon streak of The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Red Badge of Courage (1951), and The African Queen (1951), John Huston directed a fascinating movie called We Were Strangers--which could have been the working title of almost any picture Huston made. The first endeavor of his and Sam Spiegel's independent Horizon company, it's a very offbeat film that deserves to be better known. In 1933, an American leftist (John Garfield) returns to his native Cuba to help topple a dictator. Thrown together with a diverse band of co-conspirators--including a recently radicalized young woman (Jennifer Jones) and an endearingly lusty proletarian (Gilbert Roland)--he hatches a macabre plot for planting a bomb under El Presidente and his cabinet. Have no doubt that, in finest Hustonian tradition, the quest will trace a twisted itinerary, with several grotesque detours, to the most bitterly ironical of endings. The casting of Garfield, soon to be a victim of the Hollywood blacklist, retrospectively darkens this HUAC-era production. Aesthetically, the Cuban setting, spare rhythms, and stylized, quasi-literary dialogue speak to the looming shadow of Ernest Hemingway, a big influence on Huston's early writing and a boon companion of the director and co-screenwriter Peter Viertel, while in theme and mood the picture honors the growing cult of French Existentialism-with-a-capital-E (hardly coincidentally, Huston had directed the first American stage production of No Exit not long before). --Richard T. Jameson More...
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