Affair In Trinidad

If Gilda and Notorious had a baby, it might look like Affair In Trinidad, a 1952 noir directed by Vincent Sherman. To start, like Gilda, it stars Rita Hayworth (she even throws her hair back, a la Gilda) and Glenn Ford, and is set not quite in South America, on the island of Trinidad. Like Ingrid Bergman in Notorious, she is asked to go undercover and seduce the villain (here Alexander Scourby), who is up to no good with evil foreigners (in Gilda and Notorious it was Germans, here it appears to be Russians). Bergman had to marry Claude Rains in Notorious, Hayworth just has to go to a birthday party. Notorious, of course, is also set in South America. It appears that that continent was viewed as a haven for ne'er-do-wells after the war.

Hayworth also does a couple of song and dance numbers. She works in a club, and her husband is a sketch artist. But he turns up dead, first thought to be a suicide, but then the officials suspect murder by Scourby, and thus Hayworth goes undercover. Ford plays her brother-in-law, flying in and immediately doubting a suicide verdict. She can't tell him what the police are having her do, so he gets twisted out of shape, because he falls in love with her.

It's not a bad film, but it's not that great, either, as it reminds us of better films. There's an interesting racial subtext. At the time, the island was a British colony. An American consulate is looking for the Inspector, and at first he thinks it's a black man, but is immediately directed to a white man, and I don't think that's a coincidence. Juanita Moore plays Hayworth's maid, and she is the wisest character in the film, a sort of backhanded attempt to be racially sensitive, but instead plays into the "magic negro" stereotype.

There's also some comedy, as the wife of a German scientist (Valerie Bettis) has a few sloppy drunk scenes, which the dignified Scouby can't abide.