We Were Strangers

China Valdes joins the underground in Cuba after the chief of the secret police kills her brother, and there she meets and falls in love with the American Tony Fenner. Tony’s plan is this: dig a tunnel from the city cemetery to the family plot of a senior official, kill the man, and blow up the entire hierarchy when it gathers for the state funeral. Most of the film takes place inside that tunnel, and it is less interested in the plan than in how long the people digging can stand each other and their own purpose. John Huston adapted it from Robert Sylvester’s novel Rough Sketch and set it in 1933, inside the movement against the rule of Gerardo Machado. Jennifer Jones and John Garfield lead, with Pedro Armendáriz, Gilbert Roland and Ramon Novarro. On release the Hollywood Reporter accused it of being the heaviest serving of communist theory ever put before an audience outside the Soviet Union.