Purple Prose on the Silver Screen : A TWENTIETH CENTURY JOB, <i> By G. Cabrera Infante (Faber & Faber $24.95; 371 pp.)</i>

American film reviewing has widely become a fandango of fools, of wagging thumbs and swaggering blurbs. Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s “A Twentieth Century Job” arrives like a bottle tossed into the ocean of film 30 years ago, one with a message for anyone not taking their film pleasures seriously: Wake up, stupid.

This bracingly smart ensemble of reviews is from the Cuban novelist who since the 1960s has lived in London in voluntary exile from the land of The Beard. As a young intellectual, Infante, now 63, planted this garden of barbed flowers during the waning Batista era, and then briefly during the ruddy dawn of Castro. His hopes for a free cinema died quickly.

A Groucho Marxist, funny and impudent, Infante brought to these pieces the vervy bravura of an Otis Ferguson, Francois Truffaut, Dwight Macdonald or Pauline Kael. His reviews have a slash and scintillation that are grounded in thought. Though at moments preening or purple-prolix, Cabrera was a master of swift delight and demolition. Of the latter, savor his sinking of wooden, water-logged Howard Keel in “Floods of Fear”: “Wouldn’t it have been easier to provide Esther Williams with a moustache?”

Infante clearly had one eye on the Parisian pot of Cahiers du Cinema during its ‘50s ferment. He shared many of its American enthusiasms (for Vincente Minnelli, Howard Hawks, Robert Aldrich) but seldom fell into auteurist fever at the drop of a name. This cinephile knew how to toss hot pepper into torpid eyes, but also had the maturity to campaign for worthy favorites and to revise judgment (downward with “The Red Shoes,”movingly upward with “La Grande Illusion”). As in Truffaut’s collected reviews, here is a true critic, wings radiant, right out of the chrysalis.

Traveling to Mexico and New York, more often ducking into the cool dark of Havana cine-clubs and movie houses, Infante negated provincialism. Today, we can envy his calendar of films, the storm front of his enthusiasm. He swooped down hawkishly (Hawksishly in a rousing defense of “Rio Bravo”), seizing the French New Wave’s treasure and that of the last classic Hollywood, that “immense factory of gilded pills,” but also Mexican documentaries, Garbo revivals, the arrival in Cuba of Soviet films.

Infante, whose mind is a cyclotron of pun-and-stun wordplay, uses the framing device of a narrator. “Job” is the friend, editor and sparring alter-ego of “Cain” (Infante’s old nom de critique, alluding to the Bible, to filmdom’s most famous citizen, and to Cabrera Infante). Job cheers and jeers, sniping at young Cain’s “execrable egotism,” excoriating a “vile phrase,” or commending a prophetic insight. His italicized intrusion, a postmodernist gig that often giggles up its sleeve, is lively but pretentious.

Why the revisionist stunt work? These reviews stand well alone and rarely seem old; some dated comments are part of the value. Job, a picador jabbing his torero, lays on many bad jokes (such as “robbing poor Borges blind”) and becomes a pest. Young Cain devours light from the screens of Old Havana, while Job the jaded wise guy hangs out in the lobby, picking popcorn from his dentures.

No book of reviews can be read straight through, but Infante’s can be consumed in large gulps. His calling Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” the first romantic work of the century is a tab of excess worth paying to savor his vertiginous thrill with the film (which pulled him back on three more nights). Infante’s demolition of “The Old Man and the Sea” is Carthaginian, and has there ever been a funnier rave than his squib on “The Court Jester”?

In one howler, Infante declares that in “Paths of Glory” director Stanley Kubrick “puts away his technical brilliance.” Far from it! More easily forgiven is the four-page ramble around “Around the World in 80 Days,” which rather smartly restores to interest the dumb rush generated by Mike Todd’s vast whimsy. And with the fabled work like “The Gold Rush” or an obscure one like “Wind Across the Everglades,” Cain achieved true poetry of praise.

There are some blind spots about actors. To write so well on “The Horse’s Mouth” but ignore Alec Guinness is perverse (and why so little on James Dean in “East of Eden”?) Yet Infante also sagely noted that Guinness in “Father Brown” acted “with the scant sympathy Lutherans feel for Catholics” (never mind that Guinness later became Catholic), and plumbed in Rock Hudson “the defect of saying his lines as if he were an actress and not an actor.”

Ever the skeptic, Infante brought sympathy of rare grace to Bresson’s “The Diary of a Country Priest.” Though Latin, he disliked bullfighting, until “Torero” stirred him with its bloody mystique. Not a sentimentalist, he yet wrote of “La Strada” with a tender gravity worthy of Fellini. As with the best critics, in the celluloid DNA of Infante’s soul is a generosity born of hope and dreams, not the fuddy “correctness” of a culture commissar.

Despite some squirming from Job, this book is the open diary of a romance recollected in lust: Man pursues movies, man “gets” movies, man marries movies to smart criticism. Shortly before exile, Cain eagerly believed that Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” would spark a new era, would change the show for good and forever. He was largely wrong about that, but the zeal of his hope is cherishable.