Cuban Confidential (1956) Online

The line between pornography and "experimental" (or so-called underground) films is tenuous, and this presumably unreleased (unreleasable) Cuban movie is a good example.

Cinematographer/producer Manuel S. Conde shot this baby in 1956 but was happily ensconced soon after in the U.S. of A. where he churned out many a softcore skin flick -not of high quality but serving the exploitation market. With this fledgling effort he was trespassing into Italian neo-realism territory, with merely morbid results.

Resulting picture, duly issued on video by Something Weird since it is weird enough, has the obsessive qualities of the twin "morbid" genres: horror and porn, but it amounts to nothing. Story of a guy wandering around Havana pre-Revolution, taking the worries of the world inexplicably on his shoulders and brooding over various aspects of death, sounds like the kind of crap Hollywood will someday remake as an unwatchable Nic Cage vehicle (ouch!!).

Sure there are some decent shots along the way, capturing of a local 1956 carnival, superstar of the future Celia Cruz belting a song, and enough cryptic nonsense to keep one watching, "up to a certain point" (to steal the title of a fine Cuban film of two decades hence). Writer-director Mario Barral, who according to IMDb made an "erotic" Cuban film 2 years later, has created a hodge-podge of clichés and conundrums that lead nowhere. Our hero's obsessions are obscure or baldly obvious: why should an ugly criminal be executed -is it because he's ugly?; why do children die in hospital everyday?; why is life all about suffering and death? Other than building up an atmosphere of unrelenting gloominess, this farrago is a dead-end, which might have worked better as a short film no more than 15 minutes long.

For no particular reason, the movie is bookended by a goofy guy reading a book of the same title (De Espaldas) and cackling for no good reason. Before he gives us a frustrating non-ending, the main non-story ends up in unsatisfying "Wizard of Oz" fashion, like when Dorothy was back in Kansas. I hated both the climax and the cackling denouement.

On the same DVD-R from SWV is a brilliant 10-minute film THE GENTLEMAN IN ROOM 6, that IMDb fails to list at all. Directed in 1952 by Alexander Hammid (who co-directed Maya Deren's timeless MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON) and scripted by Sidney Carroll, with cinematography by Boris Kaufman, it is everything CUBAN CONFIDENTIAL ain't: concise, powerfully morbid and packing a real wallop with its surprise ending. It's a true classic, but hardly worth the 10 beans to buy it as an extra with the crappy main feature CC.