Not Enough Sean Connery in Richard Lester's Rambling, Shambling Film
(MINOR SPOILERS)
I never saw "Cuba" when it came out; I always enjoy catching a movie decades after release and trying to see it through the tunnel of time.
There were some surprises.
Surprise number one was a failure of my memory. I recalled "Cuba"(with Sean Connery as the star) and "Havana"(with Robert Redford as the star) as having come out near in time to each other, like those save-the-farm or volcano movies that got released in competition back in the day.
Nope. "Cuba" (1979) and "Havana"(1990) were released 11 years apart! Thus does a lifetime watching or reading about movies eventually mash entire DECADES into one long continuum of time.
Nonetheless, both "Cuba" and "Havana" are about the period in 1959 when Castro took the island from Bautista and our decades-long "90 miles from Miami" Communist enclave took root. "Godfather II" famously covered this period as well -- the fall of Cuba as the bearded rebels took over -- but "Cuba" devotes a whole movie to it.
Surprise number two was: Richard Lester's direction of the film. Boy, did he have a recognizable style. It was first on display(on film) with the two Beatles movies -- A Hard Day's Night and Help -- and all you have to do is watch those two movies to get a taste of it: semi-documentary in look, but archly nonsensical in the execution, with certain scenes being "cut into cross-cuts" in such a way that they just become funny in the needless cross-cutting and elongation of the scenes. Lester movies -- long before Robert Altman came along -- were also famous for having side characters in the frame mumbling all manner of side remarks.
Aside from the two Beatles films, I recall Lester's inimitable style flavoring his "Three Musketeers" of 1974 and its split-off sequel "Four Musketeers" of 1975. Also "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum"(1966) and "How I Won the War"(with John Lennon; 1967.) And Petulia (1968) in the US with Julie Christie and George C. Scott.
See only three of four of those Lester films, and you'll get his style down pat.
And damn if that style doesn't infest "Cuba," too.
I mean, I turned the movie on expecting an epic tale of ill-fated love amidst the Revolution...and got a rambling, shambling, oddly comic take on the last days of Bautista, filmed, audio-recorded, and cut in Lester's signature cross-cutting mumbling, digressive style.
Sean Connery was such a great big movie star in his prime, its worth watching Cuba just to watch him. He had it all: tall, strapping, voice, face, charisma.
And Cuba elects not to show him a lot, or to use him a lot. His character is a British military man and mercenary who shows up to help Bautista's army "crush"(hah) Castro's team. But Connery doesn't get to do much in that regard other than offer a bit of military advice and engage in a couple of brief shootouts. One Bautista military officer sent to help him(Hector Elizondo, always good) murmurs "I think you've come too late," and the "General" who is hiring him -- good ol' Martin Balsam -- was recently a corporal and seems to know nothing about how to conduct war. (Until, weirdly, he does, commanding some hand-me-down tanks with enough authority to blow up some Castro-ites with lethal accuracy.)
But -- again, and weirdly -- it seems as if almost as much screen time is given to Jack Weston as to Sean Connery in this film. Weston was the cherubic 60's character guy who worked the comedy side of the street as well as the thriller side(bad guys in Mirage and Wait Until Dark) and here, he's an Ugly American out to buy out a cigar factory and make some dough. It turns out that Weston had been in Richard Lester's "The Ritz" of 1976 and got his role here from Lester plus lots of screen time to play it.
I thought about Alfred Hitchcock's Castro-era film "Topaz" as I watched "Cuba" and determined: this film was more professional and adult, but "Topaz" was more stylish and committed to the emotion of the topic.
About which: the tall middle-aged superstar Connery is paired with the young and petite Brooke Adams as his long-ago paramour, and they seem like a mismatch from the start. He's a big star; she's not. He's got about 30 years on her age-wise, and it doesn't look good. Her CHARACTER -- now the wife of a rich scion of Cuban wealth(Chris Sarandan) reminds Connery that their long-ago affair took place when she was 15! ("17," said Connery, who looks visibly shocked at her correction.)
As with "Godfather II" (which I have seen) and "Havana"(which I have not but I read about it), "Cuba" takes up those final weeks when everything fell apart, Bautista's mix of political corruption(a literally rigged election) and inferior military expertise fell to a rebellion borne of ...well, I dunno.
There is an interesting bit where a Rico Parra-type Castroite and his men capture a group of Bautista soldiers and he tells them: "When you capture us, you kill us. We will not kill you. Instead, we ask you to join us, not fight us." And thus, evidently, did Castro complete his taking of power.
A very Lester-esque running gag -- albeit a brutal one -- is how one young Castroite wanna-bee zips through the whole movie with a gun, invariably trying to kill a key character like Connery's or Saranadon's...but inevitably killing some innocent bystander nearby instead. This guy literally can't shoot straight, and "Cuba" postulates its final war battles as sloppy stumblings-about where people get killed for the wrong reasons and victory is almost accidental.
It is a measure of the Richard Lester-esque tone of "Cuba" that the opening sequence spends a lot of footage just watching Martin Balsam's general watching some hookers sunning themselves beside a Havana swimming pool. Nothing else goes on, its just incidental footage of Balsam relaxing. But there he is, Martin Balsam still in major motion pictures 19 years after Psycho.
Recommended...but only as a two-star oddity of a thing, an auteur's film to be sure.
With a great big, handsome and commanding movie star in Sean Connery. Doing very little.