Watch Pier 5, Havana For Free

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Touches You

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

Cameron Mitchell plays an American who has come to Castro's Cuba in order to locate a friend who has mysteriously disappeared. The police are quite nice and helpful but Mitchell's life is constantly at risk due to evil counter-revolutionaries. In addition, Mitchell's old girlfriend and their past relationship together is a simmering subplot.This film was made during a tiny window in which the American film industry fell in love with Castro's Cuba and the Cubans moved towards Communism and repression. Errol Flynn made a couple films about this Cuba and "Pier 5, Havana" is another--odd little American relics where the new government was seen as very good and reasonable.Seeing this film and its very idealistic view of the new Cuba is pretty interesting. Here in Castro's new utopia, the police allow people to walk around town with handguns, they don't send suspects to political prisons and there are no purges and executions. Instead, the bad guys are all the counter-revolutionaries bent on undoing the recent revolution and a bringing about a return of the Batista government through violence and murder.Now all this is naive, but at the time it looked like this could be the new Cuba--so I can forgive this. However, what I had more trouble with was the occasionally bad dialog and awkward plotting. Now I am NO saying it's a bad film--it's just not a very good one. I'd recommend it more as an unusual curiosity as opposed to a good film.HORRIBLE Cliché WARNING: At the end, Mitchell catches the bad guy and is holding a gun on him. Does he shoot this dangerous man? NOPE! He drops the gun to duke it out man-to-man! Also, CONVENIENTLY, the lady's husband just happens to die so she and Mitchell can have each other. The way this is handled is SUPER-awkward.

TCM aired this movie the other morning. For around 45 years,this film has not shown up an the TV or released on DVD or video. Filmed in Havana,Cuba in 1959,this film makes mention on how the United States helped Fidel Castro and his followers oust the Batista government and put Castro in power. As it turned out,that was a big mistake for the United States. Rumours circulated that the U.S. government purchased all the copies of this film and destroyed them. Well,not true. Turners classic movies has a copy. As for the film,their in nothing really interesting to see. Other than Cameron Mitchel,and lessor known actress,Allison Hayes,this film was filmed on a cheap budget.

Cheesy melodrama set during the time after the fall of Battista in Cuba. While the film has a man shot in the airport for crimes that a never specified this film seems to be a starting point for Hollywood's fixation with tin pot Latin American dictators/despots. In this film the bad guys are the supporters of Battista and the law abiding guys are working for the Castro Government. The only thing missing is a rally for Che. Not a very good film the acting is surprisingly wooden. I had a lot of good memories of Cameron Mitchell but this film made me question my recollections. The film was obviously shot on sets and very little location work is done. The dialog is uninspiring, and unlike other films of this era this film is not much fun to watch.

**SPOILERS** With his arrival to Havana just days after Cuban Revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, known to his many followers as "El Beardo", and his man took over the city American businessman Steve Daggett, Cameron Mitchell, tries to find his good friend and army buddy, who saved his life in Korea, Hank Miller, Logan Field. Having dropped out of sight and very possibly into the Caribbean Sea after one of his drunken binges, that he's become famous for, Hank has been given up by everyone, except Steve, for deadGetting in touch with the newly installed, by Castro, Havana police chief Let. Garcia, Michael Granger, Steve is introduced to Hank's grieving wife Monica played by the statuesque 5 foot 7 inch tall Allison Hayes. This a year after Allison achieved motion picture immortality playing the part of Nancy Archer in "The Attack of the 50 Foot Woman". As we soon see Steve and, even though she refuses to acknowledge it, Monica have been lover from way back before she dropped him for his friend the helplessly alcoholic Hank Miller. It's when Lt. Garcia enlightens Monica with that fact, by showing Monica a photo of her Hank and Steve together, that she grudgingly admits that she and Steve have known each other for a number of years. All this soon becomes moot a minute later when it's brought out that Monica is now married to the handsome Cuban speed boat enthusiast and millionaire tobacco farmer Fernando Ricardo, Eduardo Noriaga.As it soon turns out Hank a cracker-jack airplane and speed boat mechanic somehow got involved with a gang of Batista, the Cuban dictator whom Castro ousted from power, supporters who want him to convert a number of outdated transport planes into fighter-bombers. These out of power gangsters, courtesy of the Castro Revoluton, are now planning to get their boy-Batista-back in power by any means possible! Even if they have to carpet bomb Havana to do it! Steve who never expected any of this cloak and dagger stuff has now, by his friendship with the missing Hank Miller, become the target of the Cuban Police in trying to overthrow the Castro Regime.The action gets hot and heavy with Steve trying to prevent a "Bay of Pigs", two years before it actually happened, like assault on Castro's Cuba from the air not, like the "Bay of Pigs" itself, the sea. It doesn't help Steve that much when the missing and reportedly dead Hank Miller shows up, drunk as usual, to make things even worse, for Steve and his ex-wife Monica, then they already were!It's just when the pro-Batista men were about to execute their devious plan, the bombing of Havana, that the police lead by Let. Garcia got the drop on them having them scurry for safety, as well as their lives, out of Cuba. Steve himself played no favorites between the two sides, Castro and Batista, now has a score to settle with the man, the the leader of Castro guy group, who not only kidnapped and later had his good friend Hank Miller murdered but ordered one of his goons, who was more then happy to do it, to try to assault Monica! This attempted rape on his, the goons, part failed miserably when Steve came to Monica's rescue and judo-chopped him to death!It's surreal to see an American made motion picture released in 1959 that actually championed Fidel Castro and his Marxist Regime in Cuba as the good guys in the movie! It was a year later that the US Government started through its CIA and Miami based Free Castro Cubans volunteers a number of major covert, and in the case of the "Bay of Pigs" overt, military actions to overthrow Castro that has lasted, some 50 years, until he himself voluntarily resigned from office because of ill health! Not because of any of the extensive military economic as well as political, in forcing country's to boycott trade with the Cuban Government, pressures put on him by the United States Government!