The story draws on events that occurred as part of the political violence that led to the overthrow of Cuban dictator Gerardo Machado y Morales in 1933.
They had previously constructed a tunnel into the Vazquez family crypt in Havana's Colón Cemetery and planted an explosive device there, anticipating that Machado would attend the funeral.
The revolutionaries spend days digging the tunnel, and struggle with the fact that they will kill some officials who are less than entirely evil and also take the lives of innocent bystanders.
Fenner rages about his failure, and the disgrace of returning to the people who funded his trip with small donations, after he had fled as a boy with his father.
[2] One critic has noted the film is "a barely disguised indictment of U.S. foreign policy" as well as a study of "the poetry of failure" typical of Huston's style.
According to Peter Viertel, "Huston was going through a lot of personal problems at the time, and he was unable to concentrate on the film" even though it presented serious challenges: "It was a very difficult story with an ending that wasn't exactly considered happy by Hollywood standards."
[5] The title, chosen by the distributor Columbia Pictures in place of Rough Sketch,[citation needed] refers to how the revolutionaries come together with no prior associations, sharing only their political principles.
[5] John Huston directed the film between two box office successes: The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948) and The Asphalt Jungle (1950).
In The New York Times, Bosley Crowther praised the physical and psychological realism of the conspirators, but he disliked Jennifer Jones' performance and missed a central romance: "the real emotional tinder which is scattered within this episode is never swept into a pyramid and touched off with a quick, explosive spark".
[6] Reviews in Time and Collier's were more positive, but The Hollywood Reporter denounced its politics: "a shameful handbook of Marxian dialectics ... the heaviest dish of Red theory ever served to an audience outside the Soviet".