SOURCE: A review of A Twentieth-Century Job, in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4640, March 6, 1992, p. 17.

In the following review, King establishes the relevance of the film essays in A Twentieth-Century Job.

Readers acquainted with Guillermo Cabrera Infante's major works—Three Trapped Tigers, Infante's Inferno, Holy Smoke—will be aware of his pervading interest in film. As a young man, he had a regular movie column in Cuba, first in the journal Carteles, 1954–60, and later in the short-lived but extremely lively magazine of the Revolution, Lunes de Revolución, 1959–60. The bulk of A Twentieth-Century Job (which first appeared in Spanish in 1963) is made up of film criticism for those years, signed with the pseudonym G. Cain (G, CAbrera INfante). These pages are framed by the comments of another narrator who is, supposedly, the editor and annotator of the collected works and who criticizes and engages with his friend Cain. Alter...