A collage of myths, stereotypes, facts, and artifacts of pre-Castro Cuba: the cigar factory, the sugar plantation, the yacht club, the night club, the golf course, the jai-alai and tennis courts, the cockfight, the gambling, the graft, the gold-braided army uniforms, the bare-shouldered women's fashions, the tile walls and floors, the margaritas and daiquiris, the passion and romance, the rigged elections, the student terrorists, the priests, the foreign investors, and the everywhere evidence of cultural imperialism, from the ramshackle tenement named Hollywood Hotel, to the blonde Hollywood starlet and her Santa Claus striptease, to the billboards and the TV advertising ditties ("Mr. Clean gets rid of dirt and grime and grease in just a minute./Mr. Clean cleans your whole house and everything that's in it"), to Danny and the Juniors' "At the Hop" on the car radio, to Batista himself watching in private a 16mm print of a Hammer horror film. And on and on. All of the several plotlines would be better understood, and less liable to criticism, as sightseeing routes, and the characters better understood as sightseers, traveling into areas rich in cultural data and functioning themselves as nothing more than pieces of that data. The total effect is luscious in atmosphere and 1950s period, ambivalent in politics, witty, light, impressionistic. With Sean Connery, Brooke Adams, Chris Sarandon, Danny De La Paz, Hector Elizondo, Martin Balsam, Denholm Elliott, and Jack Weston; written by Charles Wood; directed by Richard Lester. (1979) — Duncan Shepherd