We Were Strangers [DVD]

Product Description

It's been seven long years since his people last tasted freedom. So when Cuban-born expatriate Tony Fenner (John Garfield) finally returns to Havana, he joins the Organization, a small band of revolutionaries dedicated to ending the tyrannical rule of President Gerardo Machado. Aided by fellow rebel China Valdes (Jennifer Jones), Fenner proceeds with his audacious master plan: to execute the head of the senate and then assassinate all of Cuba's leaders at his well-attended state funeral. And so, as the secret police race to stop them, Fenner and Valdes tunnel beneath the cemetery, where theyintend to detonate a bomb so powerful, it will wipe out Machado's entire government with one blow. One of director John Huston's most controversial and rarely screened films, WE WERE STRANGERS is an explosively intense, action-suspense thriller.

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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