Un Traductor
Recently released on Blu-ray and DVD: Un Traductor, The Outer Limits: Season Two, The Black Windmill, The Serpent’s Egg.
Un Traductor
Set in the 1980s and early ’90s, Un Traductor opens with archival footage of Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to Cuba. In the airport crowd, greeting the Soviet leader is Malin, a young professor at Havana University’s Russian department. He’s happily married and lives in a modern home that would not be out of place in a gated American suburb. The grocery shelves are well stocked and gasoline is cheap and plentiful.
Un Traductor, by directors Rodrigo and Sebastián Barriuso, traces the changes in Cuba and in Malin. He is irritated when yanked from college and assigned to translate for Russian children, survivors of Chernobyl sent to Cuba for treatment. He becomes a storyteller and grows as a person. Meanwhile, Cuba sinks into bare shelves and gas shortages as the Soviet Bloc dissolves and Soviet aid ends. Economic pressure causes Malin’s family to fracture in this unfailingly interesting dramatization of Cuban life.
“The Outer Limits: Season Two”
The pre-Kirk William Shatner plays the astronaut commanding Project Vulcan, the first interplanetary mission. But something is strange about him after he returns from space. “Cold Hands, Warm Heart” is among the episodes of “The Outer Limits: Season Two” (1964-1965). The hour-long science-fiction show included other familiar actors as well as screenplays by the likes of Harlan Ellison. Sometimes, the writing exceeded production values, but often enough, the directors worked well within tight budgets.
The Black Windmill
Director Don Siegel (Dirty Harry) transferred his lickety-split, no-time-to-waste formula to the U.K. for this 1974 spy movie. In other words: tough guys, loose women and fast cars meet castles. Michael Caine endows the film with insouciant gravitas, that implacable seen-it-already cool that he perfected. The film places Caine’s MI6 agent in a scenario worthy of Hitchcock, chased between a Soviet ring (that kidnapped his son) and his superiors in a dangerous (and visually adept) web.
The Serpent’s Egg
Shot in English, The Serpent’s Egg (1977) is Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s lone Hollywood film. David Carradine stars as a Jewish American in 1923 Berlin who falls into a world of trouble. Some of the cinematography mirrors the German Expressionist films of the setting. The sad cafes and tacky cabarets—and even the police—are suffused with a rising sense of fear. The white-on-black credits accompanied by scratchy old jazz surely inspired Woody Allen.
