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  Directed by
  Starring
  Specs
  • Widescreen 1.85:1
  • Dual Layer (RSDL 66.25)
  Languages
  • English: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
  • French: Dolby Digital Surround
  • Spanish: Dolby Digital Surround
  • German: Dolby Digital Surround
  • Italian: Dolby Digital Surround
  Subtitles
    English, French, German, Czech, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish
  Extras
  • Cast/crew biographies
  • Featurette
  • Production notes
  • Web access
Havana
Universal/Universal . R4 . COLOR . 138 mins . M15+ . PAL

  Feature
Contract

Director Sydney Pollack has had a most impressive career to date, though his strike rate in the director’s chair has not always been the best. He has hits like The Way We Were, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Tootsie to his credit, and in 1985 he scored the Best Director Oscar for the epic Out Of Africa. Yet he’s also capable of helming films that seem unnaturally half-baked - the noble but misfired movie version of John Grisham’s The Firm, the pointless remake of the classic Sabrina - and the first film he directed after Out Of Africa, the well-intentioned Havana.

It’s Christmas, 1958 in the Cuban city of Havana - a city that has gained a reputation for itself as a carefree, hedonistic destination for people from all walks of life. But all that’s about to change - a revolution is coming, and very soon Fidel Castro will rise to power and change Cuba forever. In the midst of this last gasp of the old Havana, affirmed gambler Jack Weil (Robert Redford) searches for “the big one” - the card game to end all card games, one that will satisfy his lust for high-stakes gambling.

But then he meets Bobby Duran (Lena Olin) - a beautiful, exotic woman who he almost immediately falls for. Only one problem - Bobby happens to be the wife of revolutionary Arturo Duran (an uncredited Raul Julia). Suddenly he finds himself facing a choice - should he save the woman he has fallen in love with, or just ignore the whole situation and concentrate on the card game that he came for?

Sounds cheesy, doesn’t it? And it is - Havana is essentially a re-setting of the basic story elements from Casablanca, albeit with a different tone. Redford is fairly good as Jack, and Raul Julia (who insisted he not be billed as he considered his part to be relatively small) is his usual solid self as Arturo. Lena Olin, though, simply doesn’t click as Bobby, and for much of the film looks as if she would rather be somewhere else. And that’s what many audience members will be wishing as well by the halfway mark of this movie. While it’s impeccably shot and designed, and while Redford is as charming and watchable as always, this one’s simply too long. It does fare better at home, where one can pause the action and take a break, but in the cinema Havana seemed interminable, which may explain the critical savaging it scored at the time of its release. It’s actually not as bad as some would have you believe, but Havana will probably go down best with die-hard Redford fans.

  Video
  Audio
  Extras
Contract

Presented in its correct ratio of 1.85:1, this transfer of Havana is not 16:9 enhanced - an almost sure sign that what we’re being offered here is a recycled laserdisc transfer. And the image quality would certainly bear that out - while the source material is clean, the transfer has the look of an older telecine effort. There’s a bit too much contrast and edge enhancement, with dark scenes often impenetrable and brightly lit moments suffering from what’s best described as “glare”. Some aliasing is evident on edges in the brighter scenes, but generally the encoding for DVD is good. The layer change is oddly placed at the tail end of a quiet scene between Jack and Bobby, but is negotiated reasonably smoothly. Interestingly, the running time on PAL DVD is only about 90 seconds shorter than the stated theatrical running time, implying that either this is a slightly longer version of the film than seen theatrically, or that this transfer could be an NTSC-PAL conversion (though it doesn’t look like one).

Audio is provided in Dolby Digital 5.1 - no mean feat considering that this 1990 film was mixed for plain old Dolby Stereo. The film was given a limited 70mm release in the US, though, and this multi-channel mix would have been done for those prints. It’s functional, but not spectacular, with fidelity suffering from the limitations of the day. Don’t expect aural fireworks - but then, by and large this is a dialogue-driven movie anyway.

Aside from a typically EPK-style featurette running just under six minutes (which offers little of worth), there’s only some production notes, a handful of bios and filmographies and a theatrical trailer in the extras department.


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  •   And I quote...
    "...will probably go down best with die-hard Redford fans."
    - Anthony Horan
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