An underwhelming, low-budget political drama, EXILED IN AMERICA concerns the real-life "Sanctuary" movement, an underground church-based network that welcomes refugees and rebels escaping murderous Latin American dictatorships. Sanctuary became an anathema to Washington in the
Rambo-minded 1980s, when human rights took a back seat to Cold War arms shipments and Contra gunmen.
Writer-director Paul Leder (working from the play Sanctuary, by William Norton, Sr.) casts the conflict in hackneyed terms, with Filipe Soto (Edward Albert), heroic revolutionary from an unnamed banana republic, on the run in small-town California. Tortured--and brutally castrated--by thugs in his
native land, Filipe languishes in a safehouse while his pretty wife Marla (Kamala Lopez), posing as a widow, takes a waitress job in a nearby diner. There she draws the unwanted affections of Joe Moore (Maxwell Caulfield), a young alcoholic in thrall to his insanely possessive mother Sonny (Stella
Stevens), owner of the eatery. Ever since a car crash caused by drunken Joe, Sonny's pretended to be paralyzed just to keep her son under her thumb, and she sure doesn't enjoy his flirting with the new girl.
Meanwhile a death squad from the anonymous Latin country arrives on US soil and starts blowing away anyone in contact with Soto. The lead heavy is rogue CIA agent Carl Mahler (Gary Werntz), an expressionless Aryan who doesn't argue when one doomed activist compares him to Hitler's SS. The
villains' path leads to Sunny's Diner, where a frantic Filipe has fled in delirium. He raises the assembled citizens' political consciousness by suffering torture flashbacks; he addresses the wheelchair-bound Sonny as though she were a fellow victim and mistakes Joe for a visiting yank reporter
(but he speaks to them all in English, making this key scene even less convincing than it sounds). Fortunately local Sheriff Fred Jenkins (Wings Hauser) sympathizes with the refugees, and the government goons bite the dust in a lackluster shootout. Filipe perishes, but the tragedy permits Joe--his
own manhood intact--to walk away with Marla after all, in what looks like one of those many "alternative" endings to CASABLANCA that cineastes keep talking about.
Like that Humphrey Bogart classic, EXILED IN AMERICA is based on an obscure stage play, and there the parallels end. This film's politics are simplistic, humdrum polemics in which the Reagan-esque Mahler and his crew slaughter every nun, doctor and innocent bystander they please. Soto's big
soliloquy reveals the crime that turned him into a fugitive: a Catholic university instructor, he taught students that most un-American doctrine, Thou Shalt Not Kill. The performances are unedifying at best, with veteran glamour queen Stella Stevens (THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, CHAINED HEAT) in a rare
non-sexpot role, even though the incest-tinged relationship between Sonny and Joe is torrid enough on its own terms.
EXILED IN AMERICA might at least have had timeliness on its side had it come out during the thick of the Salvadoran crisis several years ago, but the 1990 production didn't debut on home video until 1992. (Violence, substance abuse, profanity, adult situations.) leave a comment
