April 11 movie: We Were Strangers. This was an excellent thriller about the Batista revolution in Cuba. Jennifer Jones and James Garfield play Cuban revoutionaries plotting to take down the Machado government. I don't know much about this event in history, but I was struck by the point of view espoused by the movie. Not to put too fine a point on it, Jones and Garfield are terrorists. Their plan is to assassinate a high-ranking government official, then blow up the funeral, killing every major figure in the government and hundreds of civilians too. But the only time the word "terrorist" is used in the movie, it's against our sympathies: an evil policeman calls them terrorists while threatening Jones.
It just goes to show that you can't watch an old movie through a modern filter. This movie was made in 1949, just after WWII ended. I guess at that time people must have been more comfortable with the idea that sometimes civilians had to die in pursuit of an important military goal. It's hard to imagine a movie today in which the heroes plot to murder hundreds of innocent bystanders.
Jennifer Jones' acting in this movie is incredible. Her character is so dark and she plays it with full conviction. I shouldn't have been surprised, having seen her range in Portrait of Jenny. But when I see her face I always think of the ethereal nun in Song of Bernadette. That character is worlds apart from this one. By the end I even forgot about the fair-at-best accent and accepted her as a Cuban woman.
(The accents are all kind of bad, kind of Speedy Gonzales, not to mention the conceit of having a bunch of Cubans speaking English with phony accents to each other. Only Garfield was spared, as his character was a Cuban-born American who grew up in New York.) The funny thing was, you could totally tell who was actually Latino and who was a phony by the way they pronounced "Cuba": Cue-ba or Coo-ba.)
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