Extras - A Life in the Background

Extras line up for a job in Meet John Doe (1941)

Spotting familiar “extras” is fascinating to classic film buffs, and is something we can’t help doing even while enjoying the screen time of our favorite stars.  They may have a minute or two on camera, a single line or none at all, but they contribute immeasurably to the look and tone of a movie.

Last week we discussed Beverly Washburn’s accepting work as a television extra as an older adult despite her early career of starring and supporting roles on film and TV in the 1950s.  Once in a great while, an unknown extra became a star—John Wayne was perhaps the most famous former-extra.  Sometimes they became stand-ins and then graduated to starring roles:  Joel McCrea was a stand-in for Valentino and for Wallace Reid in the 1920s.  Gilbert Roland once served as a stand-in for Ramon Novarro, and Ann Dvorak for Joan Crawford.

The plight of most extras, though, was far from hopeful and could be heartbreaking.  Gone Hollywood, an interesting book of classic film trivia by Christopher Finch and Linda Rosenkrantz notes that Central Casting, an employment registry for studio extras, came about in the 1920s as a response to the hordes of young people heading for Hollywood in search of fame and fortune.  There were more hopefuls than there were jobs, and the lucky ones sometimes snagged a role through nefarious means, including bribes and sexual favors.  Will Hayes, of Production Code fame, set up Central Casting to circumvent feared scandal when it appeared that a fair number of prospective starlets were actually prostituting themselves for work.

Central Casting established a pool of extras and a more appropriate and professional way for them to acquire work from the studios.  Hundreds were assigned jobs on films every day, but with as many as 15,000 on the rolls, there still weren’t enough roles.  It was also a factor of their employment that they supply their own costumes—street clothes, sport clothes or evening dress for scenes that required them.  The authors of Gone Hollywood reference a 1934 Photoplay magazine article about extras pooling their meager resources and living five and six to a room to share costumes and expenses, and that others were living in Hoovervilles around Los Angeles

They would usually earn an average of $5 per day and overtime, if called for.  The authors report that in 1936, only 58 out of 5,500 men and only 20 out of 6,500 women averaged three or more days of work per week.  One could earn a little more if they were willing to take roles which required them to get wet or fall off a horse.  Certain physical impairments might also be on demand for a particular film, and often there was a demand for extras based on ethnicity or race. 

It is harrowing to recall that, according to the authors, the average yearly income for an extra in the mid 1930s was only $131.36.  Think of this the next crowd scene you see.  Their plight, especially for older extras, was sometimes met with sympathy by some directors and producers, who would throw work their way whenever possible.  MGM casting director Billy Grady organized the Casting Directors Ball to raise money for extras who were ill or in need.

Perhaps the most famous of these not famous actors was Bess Flowers, who we’ve mentioned on this blog from time to time, known as The Queen of the Hollywood Extras. She worked in the background from the early 1920s through the early 1960s, in more than 350 films, as well as television.  She was one of the founders of the Screen Extras Guild.

 Gone Hollywood.  Finch, Christopher and Linda Rosenkrantz (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.) 1979.

The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima - 1952

Tomorrow, Friday, October 13^th, marks the 100^th anniversary of the “Miracle of the Sun,” the final apparition in Fátima, Portugal, of the Virgin Mary after several successive months of appearing to three children.  We turn our attention today to The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima (1952), which dramatizes these events.

The story is inherently dramatic, involving the supernatural, as well as historical fact, but the obvious third leg of the stool—our human capacity for faith and what we choose to do about it—is not as strong an element in this movie as it might be.  Much of the unquestioning faith of the children, and the doubtful faith of their elders, seem conveyed as a lesson learned by rote.

One is tempted to regard this movie as an attempt by Warner Bros. to cash in on the tremendous critical and financial success of The Song of Bernadette (1943), made nine years earlier at 20^th Century-Fox, and which garnered several Academy Awards.  That movie addressed the visions of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes, France, in 1858 to Bernadette Soubrious. We discussed that movie here in this previous post.  Here, from that post:

The Song of Bernadette (1943) pits man against miracle in a many-layered universe. The first layer of this complicated universe is the historical 19th century event on which the story is based.  Then, there is the book by Franz Werfel and the World War II climate under which that book was written and published.  Finally, there is Hollywood, that tries diplomatically to be both pious and frank, spiritual and temporal, to present a money-making story, and yet present it under the auspices of a religious experience…

Man is by nature a creature which believes. We have religions and sometimes complicated protocols of faith. We have superstitions, and we have good luck and bad luck, and we have worries and fears and paranoia, and that is all part of what we willingly believe without proof. On the opposite side of man’s nature is an innate skepticism.

Someone who believes in the efficacy of the prayers of his own faith, may disbelieve the efficacy of prayers of another faith.  An atheist may disbelieve the efficacy of any prayer at all, and yet wholeheartedly believe in luck, or horoscopes, or that a co-worker who gives him a dirty look is out to get him.  It may be the co-worker is just in a bad mood, but that does not shake the belief of the paranoid.  A lot of logical, sensible people knock on wood.  Even people who believe in nothing believe in something, even if it is only the superiority of their own opinions.

So, we believe, regularly, commonly, without proof.  It may be part of our DNA.  But at the same time we are skeptical over someone else’s experiences.  The Song of Bernadette shows these disparate sides of human nature and the clinging onto of human dignity more than it puts forward of one belief over another, or promotes miracles.

That The Song of Bernadette dramatizes the struggle of faith as something normal and yet at the same time, monumental, is one of its most intriguing elements.  There are many other factors which, added together, simply make Bernadette a much better movie, including a strong cast of familiar character actors, and a strong script.

The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima relies on a cast largely unknown to us, though there are numerous uncredited extras that may make you play the old game “spot the villager”: Mae Clark, Jack Kruschen, J. Carroll Nash, and Anne Whitfield (our Susan Waverly from White Christmas).  Jay Novello has a role as the father of two of the children, but the only featured adult role in this film belongs to Gilbert Roland, a favorite of mine whom we saw here in The French Line (1954) and We Were Strangers (1949).  Mr. Roland’s role is a fictional character, a lovable rogue who does not believe, but who attempts to protect the kids when townspeople and officials go after them from spreading tales about being visited by the Virgin Mary.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the film is that it centers on the three kids.  Susan Whitney is Lucia, the eldest of the three who is the leader, and her cousins, Jacinta and Francisco, who are brother and sister, played by Sherry Jackson and Sammy Ogg.  All three child actors went on to do television in the 1950s, but Susan Whitney had the briefest career.  Sherry Jackson had an uncredited role as an extra in The Great Caruso (1951), which we discussed here.

 Unfortunately, there is no depth to the children’s roles as written or as played, so they come across as something of cardboard cutouts.  It might have been better if this had intentionally been made as a children’s film, giving them a stronger screen presence and focusing on their world rather than the angry grownups, who disbelieve them, try to silence them, imprison them, and ultimately relent in a burst of dancing sunlight.

Conversely, it might have also been a better film had it addressed that wider world in which these awesome, and harrowing, adventures take place.  That is the chief difference that would have stood apart from The Song of Bernadette, which had its roots in a novel about an event from the middle of the nineteenth century.  The Fátima apparitions occurred in one of the most tumultuous years of the twentieth century, and set the foreboding prologue for what was to come in decades hence.  It is the modern aspects of the story of Fátima that makes it so compelling, even eerie, and would have made a stronger film.

The historical setting begins before the 1917 start of the film story and extends beyond its epilogue of the modern basilica in 1951 at the site of the former apparitions.  In October 1910 Portugal endured a violent political revolution, one consequence of which was the closing of many churches and imprisonment of many clergy.  The three children of the story are poor, living a secluded rural life as shepherds, pastorinhos, and are unaware of most of the politics of their own country, let alone the enormous events taking place in the rest of Europe.  We are in the thick of World War I, begun with an assassin’s bullet and toppling the governments of several nations, leaving millions of dead strewn across muddy battlefields, and millions of refugees starving.

One government in peril is czarist Russia.  The coming communist regime will have consequences for the rest of the world, for the rest of the century.  When the Virgin Mary appears to the three children, she brings messages of future chastisement of the world if people do not repent and pray, including the daily praying of the Rosary, and the coming of a worse war if her warnings are not heeded.  She also tells the children, who are illiterate, they must learn to read and write, so that they may tell others of her messages to them.  The two younger children will die in the impending Spanish Influenza pandemic, which killed possibly as many as 100 million people worldwide.  These are only some of the modern events that serve as backdrop to the Marian apparitions of Fátima that made it a quite different tale to dramatize than the backdrop to the events at Lourdes, and which should have induced Warner Bros. to intentionally make Fatima a movie with a different slant and not lazily follow a template of how simple villagers take to miracles.

Interestingly, the real-life Lucia, who, as the Virgin Mary instructed her, did learn to read and write and carefully documented her experiences, recalled that when they were first told to pray that Russia might be converted, she had never heard of Russia.  The kids thought Russia was probably another little girl who needed prayers.  At the time of these apparitions from May to October 1917, Russia had not yet even become communist.  The request for prayers for Russia’s conversion was a prediction.

So too was the prediction of a second, more brutal war.  Though the Soviet Union eventually collapsed and the Cold War ended without nuclear war, still it does not take too much of a stretch of the imagination to concede the warning about the future spreading of Russia’s “errors” to the world include the current threat to overthrow our own government and democracy at the direction of the soulless Vladimir Putin, with the help of his acolyte Bannon and his puppet, Trump.  The political background of the story about three kids entrusted with heavenly messages, dire warnings, and even well-publicized three “secrets” is enough material to make a movie that is not only entertaining, but even astounding.

The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima remains today as a simple primer to show at Catholic school assemblies, but is little more than that, and I can’t imagine that was what the execs at Warner Bros. really wanted to create.  Perhaps miracles, in any form, are really too uncomfortable for us to tackle.  We want miracles, nice miracles, like winning the lottery, but when faced with miracles that carry so much weight and consequence, perhaps we really just don’t have the “courage of our convictions.”

The Miracle of the Sun was an event well documented by the press, as tens of thousands gathered to the spot where the three kids observed their last encounter together with the Holy Mother.  They had requested from her a sign that the grownups would believe them.  They were getting a little sick of being told to shut up, and put in jail.  The Blessed Mother came through big time.  While the multitudes stood in the rain, the sun came out and wobbled around, zigzagged a bit, changed colors, seemed to pulsate, and then the sun starting growing bigger, as if it was hurtling toward the earth.  The people panic.  This part in the movie where the sun comes at us is pretty scary, even despite the simple technical craft of the day.  You may find yourself running for the exits.

Then the show stops, and all the people, though having been standing in the rain for some hours, are completely dry, and the ground is all dry, and the newspaper men have quite a story to tell in their next edition.

In the movie, the rascal Gilbert Roland becomes a true believer when he sees the Miracle of the Sun, and we see him in the epilogue talking to Lucia, now a nun, many years after the event.  Oddly, the director chose to use the same child actress, Susan Whitney, to play the adult Lucia, but who speaks lip-synching to the voice of an adult actress.  It has a weird effect and seems a very poor compromise at establishing the continuity between the child and the adult visionary.

Lucia lived to be 97 years old, and died in 2005.  This past May 13^th, on the 100^th anniversary of the first apparition of the Virgin Mary at Fátima, Pope Francis canonized the two younger children, Jacinta and Francisco.  World-wide prayer services will commemorate the October 13^th “Miracle of the Sun” and pilgrims to Fátima will likely add a great number to those who regularly flock to that site.  Fátima, unlike the well-intentioned movie, is indeed a modern tale with political and social threads; that is it’s compelling “hook” and is still with us.

The French Line - 1954

The French Line (1954) pairs Jane Russell and Gilbert Roland on a transatlantic voyage.  He’s a playboy Frenchman, she’s a wealthy Texan incognito trying to find somebody who’ll love her for herself and not her money.

There were other, more tawdry taglines to this Howard Hughes-produced film, originally shown in theaters in 3-D to more fully capture Jane’s most publicized attributes.  To her credit, her likeably good-old-gal charm rises above the costumes and dance routines designed to keep her bra size the main focus.

I had been meaning to cover this one sometime or other, but was spurred to move it up in the queue from the recent mention in the excellent TCM interview of Kim Novak, noting that this was her film debut.  She’s a chorus girl, and if you blink, you miss her.  She's on the left in this shot.

Other bit roles by actors who never quite reached Miss Novak’s fame include Charles Smith, who shows up as a reporter.  We’ve met him before in Dive Bomber here, and The Shop Around the Corner here.  

Kasey Rogers, who you’ll remember best as Louise Tate on TV’s Bewitched shows up as Jane Russell’s newly-married pal, whose marital bliss leaves Jane envious. 

Our old pal Arthur Hunnicutt, who we saw here at a prospector galoot in Split Second, shows up as an oil wildcatting galoot, and Jane’s guardian.  He’s a loveable old cuss, but a bit too loud.  HE SHOUTS EVERY LINE.

Craig Stevens has a minor role as Jane’s swell guy fiancé who breaks off the wedding because he’s too intimated by her money.  A pal reminds Jane, “You’ve been a corporation since you were three.”

This is Jane’s tale of woe.  Men are either attracted by her money, or overwhelmed by it.

Miss Russell sheds her Texas blue jeans and boots, and heads to New York to meet her buddy, fashion designer Mary McCarty, and heads with her to Paris.  McCarty’s on business to take her new line to a fashion show, and Jane pretends to be one of her models.

It’s a pleasure to see Mary McCarty in a comic relief role.  She pulls out a bottle of booze from her desk drawer and offers it to Jane, “Tea, darling?”  She’s probably more well known to theatre buffs, including a featured role in Follies in 1971, and a Tony nomination for Anna Christie in 1977.

Bess Flowers plays one of the sales ladies in her shop.  Go Bess!

The film is famous for getting into trouble with the Breen Office and with the Catholic National Legion of Decency.  It’s been cut and censored here and there, and the version you might see on TCM is considered the edited version.  One uncensored excerpt of Jane’s “Lookin’ forTrouble” number is here on YouTube.

The songs are mostly cute.  Jane bebops in a duet with her maid, Theresa Harris, with several peek-a-boo moments as she’s bathing.  Unfortunately, there’s no duet with Gilbert Roland, and there should be.

He’s my favorite part of the movie.  We’d noted his virile charm here in We Were Strangers.  Mr. Roland’s charming manner and smooth, rich baritone are really quite beautiful in “Wait Till You See Paris”, which he croons to Jane on shipboard—one of those movie moonlit nights, with couples gazing at the water over the ship’s rail.

“With a Kiss” is a kick-your-heels-up number he performs in a hotel room full of female fans, but my favorite is “Comment Allez Vous,” which is a sweet, waltz-time melody he croons with lullaby softness to a couple of kids fighting over a toy music box.  It’s really a lovely song, and he could have used it just as capably to seduce Jane as to quiet a couple of noisy kids.

The ship they’re sailing on is the Liberté, (French Line, of course), which had a busy year in 1954, as I think that was the same ship Audrey Hepburn took to France in Sabrina, which we covered here.

As long as we’re on the subject of Audrey Hepburn, their trip to Paris to attend a fashion show reminds one of Miss Hepburn’s voyage to Paris for the same purpose in Funny Face (1957). 

Also, there’s a shot in The French Line at the fashion show where a couple of guys toss rolls of fabric right at the camera, just like Kay Thompson did so famously in Funny Face.  I think Kay did it better.  She had a good arm, and lots of pizzazz.

There’s a subplot involving mistaken identities, and a bit where Mr. Roland attempts to cure Jane’s “mal de mer” with a mixture of stout and champagne, which he says will also cure asthma and chicken pox.

A frothy film, that could have been better with closer attention to the romance between the easy-going playboy and the reluctant heiress, but still worth it if only to swoon over Gilbert Roland.

A photo of a sticker I noticed once on an old suitcase....

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.

We Were Strangers (1949)

“We Were Strangers” (1949) is poetic homage to failure perhaps even more than it is to the fight for liberty, and seems to be one of director John Huston’s more neglected films. It is a good film.

A group of strangers are brought together in 1933 Cuba to form an arm of the revolution against the corrupt government. Only one, played by John Garfield, is what we may call a professional revolutionary. The rest are common people who have lost loved ones to the government’s oppression. Among them are four other men, including a dock worker, a bicycle mechanic, an academic, and one woman played by Jennifer Jones.

Here again she displays her knack for losing herself in a role, and is believable as a young Cuban woman who struggles with her desire to revenge the murder of her university student brother, and also her desire to simply escape the madness around her and live a normal life. She attempts a very slight Cuban accent which is quite natural sounding, down to the cadence and inflection of her voice and not simply playing at a caricature of rolling Latin consonants. However, she’s able to hold the accent better during longer bits of dialogue; she tends the lose the accent when she has only brief lines to say. All the other members of the group are well-known actors of Spanish heritage. Only John Garfield makes no attempt to speak with a Cuban accent. His character is a Cuban exile who has lived in the United States for ten years. Though he would likely continue to have an accent, I suppose if you want John Garfield for a role, you’re willing to take him as he is.

This group of five men and one woman are brought together in the family home of Jennifer Jones’ character, who is called China or Chinita, the diminutive of her name. Her mother and sisters are removed to a safe location by the revolutionary organization so that the men may dig a tunnel from her cellar across the street to the cemetery. It is the group’s intention to assassinate a powerful member of the government, and when all the rest of the government members gather at his grave for the pomp of a state funeral, the revolutionaries will set a bomb to go off at the gravesite, thereby killing everybody and toppling the government.

The film shows many outdoor shots of Havana, which evokes the story’s setting well. However, the principle actors remained in Hollywood shooting interiors. That they are superimposed with Havana shown as rear screen projection behind them is more obvious in some shots than others. It’s interesting to see how they match up the shots. One such scene has Garfield and Jones strolling through the cemetery at night. Perhaps because the scene is dimly lit and we see the shadows of tree branches across their faces, and the omnipresent sound of crickets, the rear screen projection is not as obvious here.

The action flows well, filled with tension and the threat of danger, yet the film has an ironic lyrical quality to it, a strange tenderness. We seem to get to know the men better than we do leader John Garfield. He is stoic, inscrutable, iron-willed and not given to sentiment. His men are more apt to reveal their feelings. Gilbert Roland plays the easy-going Guillermo. Though his matinee idol days are behind him, Mr. Roland, with his lined, middle-aged face, is still the handsomest, sexiest man in the room. He charmingly steals every scene he’s in, whether it be strumming a guitar (or pretending to), or eating a guava.

The sensitive post-graduate student Ramon, played very touchingly by David Bond is from a good family and suffers acutely the agony of moral struggle. All the men discuss whether it is right to kill innocent people to free Cuba. Each, except for Garfield, fights within himself to stay focused on what they believe in their hearts is both a blow for freedom, and yet also a sin.

The men dig the tunnel in round-the-clock shifts for a month. They are constantly filthy and glistening with sweat, their undershirts clinging to them, grimy with dirt. When they are most weary, they make jokes, black humor, and then conscience-stricken, immediately repent. Jennifer Jones is their front person. She works in a bank and slips documents into files that make Garfield’s assumed guise legitimate, as a traveling talent agent booking Cuban entertainment acts. She is their eyes and ears in the outside world, picking up information, while they are confined to the tunnel.

Though as children she and her brother stole flowers from the graves of the rich people and sold them in the evenings to strolling tourists to buy food for their family, Jones represents not a poverty-stricken class of desperate malcontents, but a family struggling to enter the middle class. They have sacrificed to send her brother to university. She works an office job in an American bank. She is mannerly, soft spoken and professional. The seams on her stockings are straight, and she kisses her crucifix when she has a nightmare. We see she is a good girl, not prone to hanging out with revolutionaries.

Even the revolutionaries are a gentlemanly bunch, cordial with each other and with her. There is no flirting, no familiarity with the proper young woman who cooks their meals and sleeps alone in a curtained off room by herself. Yet when Gilbert Roland’s character takes his guitar and sweetly plays an improvised calypso song of his own invention, with the chilling verse,

“What is wrong and what is right
Will be decided with dynamite,”

also contains as his second verse, a tribute to the lone woman whose days and nights they share for a month.

Roland, standing outside in the courtyard, sidles up to the wall of her bedroom and softly sings,

“Chinita is so beautiful.
Chinita is so very good.
Five men adore our sweet Chinita.”

Sleepless, she has been lying on her bed in the dark and listening to his song. When she hears herself mentioned in the verse, her features soften into a thoughtful expression. It is not even a love song, only a chaste lullaby, and it is the first comforting she has had in the past hellish weeks when she watched her brother gunned down and decided to become a killer herself in his name.

Incidentally, and this is a very small point, but when she is roused from sleep by Garfield, the camera shows her from the back, and we see that her crucifix has flopped over her shoulder. Anyone who sleeps with a crucifix or medallion, or some jewelry on a chain will know this sometimes flops around the neck when sleeping. Possibly Huston wanted to show the crucifix in the shot, as he tends to give much notice to the religious icons in the house. Whether or not, this shot has a very natural quality and looks like she has really been asleep for hours.

Chinita is pursued by local police inspector played wonderfully by Pedro Armendáriz, a sinister thug who revels in his power. Armendáriz plays his role masterfully. He believes she will lead him to the ringleader. He also desires her.

A standout scene in the film is when Armendáriz arrives with flowers, and a meal of fresh fruit and crab to charm her and wear down her defenses, also to intimidate her. Her men scurry away into hiding, and Garfield reminds her to shout for help if Armendáriz molests her.

The arrogant, bullying official philosophizes on his power and how all, even his own mother, are afraid of him. He sits himself down at her table and eats his meal, lustily enjoying the crab, smacking the shells open against the table, sucking the meat out of the legs, ripping the meat from the shell with his hands and stuffing it into his mouth while he continues his boastful soliloquy.

One hopes Mr. Armendáriz actually did like crab, because he ends up scarfing it down like the Cookie Monster. I’d love to know how many takes this scene took. We see the palms of his hands and his fingers slick with the moisture of the dripping crab, and the bits that fall through his fingers, dangle from his lips, as he knocks back glass after glass of rum.

Satisfied he has impressed her, he begins an aggressive seduction, and pours a glass of rum into Chinita’s mouth. Jennifer Jones plays the scene with nervous intensity. This is the man who shot her brother. She walks a tightrope, as some women must do in certain threatening situations, not to appear to reject the man, and yet not to be too encouraging, either.

As much as she loathes and fears him, she has five protective men in the cellar waiting on her word to come out from hiding and defend her. If she does, their plan, their tunnel, and the lives of these men, are over. She cannot call for help without endangering them. It seems she must let happen whatever is going to happen.

Fortunately, he has gotten himself so drunk, his servant ends up dragging him away. He will remember this humiliation when he meets her next, and will make her suffer for it. He also warns her that Garfield will be shot by firing squad, that his American passport will not save him, “Perhaps the rifles will be American.”

Only his anxiety over the consequences of Armendáriz’s lust for her makes Garfield reveal his own passion for Chinitia, and through a cannonade of thunder in the middle of a storm, they map out a future life together of home, children, and a free Cuba. He is such a revolutionary that even his romancing must include Cuba.

The work of the six strangers has been so hard, so fraught with danger they begin to crack, and the sensitive Ramon feverishly rants his anxiety over the morality of killing. At one point, Gilbert Roland, ready to crack up himself, shouts that he will kill Ramon if Ramon doesn’t shut up. Garfield tells him to go ahead. It is not an order, it is not a dare; it is a laconic sort of “I don’t care what you do. It’s up to you.” Of course, Mr. Roland calms down and does nothing. These neophyte revolutionaries take orders with devotion, but left to their own decision making, they still display conscience, which for revolutionaries is a weakness.

Here is where the film itself displays a weakness. Instead of dealing with the risk Ramon represents either by killing him or taking him to a safe place, or getting him out of the country, they are saved by a deus ex machina. Ramon is accidentally killed and it is no one’s fault. Convenient, and kind of a cop out.

Chinita helps dig in the tunnel with the men, because they are falling behind. Their tunnel has reached the poor part of the cemetery, where there are no marble crypts. To their horror, they shovel remains of decaying bodies along with dirt. Still, they plod on in desperation, losing their optimism over their mission, replaced by grotesque, sickening dread.

A twist of fate makes their tunnel useless and their plan has failed. The revolutionaries, worn out and just wanting to go away, disband, as cordially as they came together, and want to use the underground’s money to get Garfield out of the country. Garfield reviles the ignominy of this, but he agrees to leave and take Miss Jones with him. She has also given up her revolutionary zeal and just wants to get away. But the cops are still after them. A last-minute sacrifice each makes for the sake of the other lands both of them back at Chinita’s house defending themselves in gunfight against the police.

We have by this time come to know each corner and cranny of her home very well, its crude furniture, the heavy wooden doors, the cement walls adorned with a large print of Christ and one of the Virgin Mary, a rosary on the wall, the courtyard and the cellar. When the battle begins, the home is ripped up by machinegun fire, and the picture depicting Christ falls to the floor, the picture tumbling out of the broken frame.

Miss Jones handles a machinegun with astounding competence, considering she is supposed to be such a nice girl.

The end scene also has its weakness. As Garfield dies in her arms, a revolution finally erupts in another part of the city and the bad guys are defeated by happy, boisterous crowds. Mr. Armendáriz’s body is briefly depicted as begun hung upside and set aflame, as if foretold by Chinita’s earlier nightmare. We are left with a successful revolution, but with our group of despondent revolutionaries who have failed. It is suggested that failure at least represents an attempt, and that the attempt must be honored, even if resulting in failure. Perhaps. Sometimes failure is just waste. Chinita’s final words of tribute ring a bit hollow.

Despite these holes, the film is typical of Huston’s vigorous style of direction. He also has a Hitchcock-like cameo as a lovelorn bank teller pining over Miss Jones.

Sometimes movies reflect the times in which they are produced, and sometimes the times in which they are produced impact on a film’s success or failure. It is so in this case. Released in 1949, the film was a kind of affront by Huston to the political witch-hunt going on in Hollywood. His own little reminder to them that it is oppression that breeds revolutions in the first place. Stories of revolution, and actors, writers, and directors of politically liberal bents were grist for the mill that ground down the careers and lives of those unfortunate to get in the way of that infamous committee. Dubbed by some as Communist propaganda, the film did not do well at the box office, and was left to fade away, perhaps haunting the resumes of the people involved with it.

That an actual revolution did begin in Cuba within the decade might point to the film’s being rather prescient. Possibly. But Cuba has always been there, and we in the US have a complicated relationship with it, no matter who was in power. At the end of the 19th Century we fought a war there with global repercussions. In effect, the Spanish-American War determined the coming century would be the so-called “American Century.” In the mid-20th Century we faced down a nuclear standoff over Cuba, and a failed invasion at the Bay of Pigs. Now in the early 21st Century, our Guantánamo Bay military installation and prison in Cuba for suspected terrorists captures headlines around the world for its controversy.

Meanwhile, here is a small monument on Islamadora in the Florida Keys to the Cubans who died trying to escape Castro’s regime over the mere 90 miles of water that separates that country and ours. We have many links with Cuba.

“We Were Strangers” is not a revolutionary primer, nor a portent of things to come in the 1950s, however coincidental. It is less empathetic to revolution than it is to the six hapless strangers. Though today we live in an era where we understandably feel little sympathy with people who plant bombs for whatever reason, it is still a very good movie with the kind of storytelling that combines both simplicity and passion that we rarely see anymore.

For more on the background of the making of “We Were Strangers” kindly have a look at this article on the TCM website by Frank Miller.