Our Man in Havana (1960)

Absolutely Fantastic

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Carol Reed echoes the musical score and, at least latterly, the dynamic compositions of earlier Graham Greene collaboration The Third Man in this 1959 Cuba-set spy outing. Alec Guiness is well cast as Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman covertly recruited by a British Intelligence agent (Noel Coward). In humourous scenes Wormold then clumsily attempts to recruit others in the same manner - notably in a Gent's lavatory....After that I'm afraid I lost the thread. Too many spies and their associates to keep track of. But the film is a good watch all the same and you always get the gist of what's going on. The authentic Cuban setting - its people and customs milling around central characters - makes for a refreshing escapism too.

"Our Man in Havana" has all of the elements of a sure-fire classic: a cast that includes Alec Guinness, Burl Ives, Noel Coward, a very lovely Maureen O'Hara and Ralph Richardson; a screenplay by Graham Greene adapted from his own novel; and direction by Carol Reed, who had tackled Greene before and made one of the best films in history ("The Third Man").So why doesn't "Our Man in Havana" entirely work? I'm not sure, but I found myself wanting to like this movie far more than I actually did. Guinness plays a vacuum cleaner salesman living in Havana who gets recruited by the British secret service to do spy work for them. He doesn't want to be a spy but wants the fat paychecks that come with it, so he feeds them fake information to avoid having to do any actual work. But when very real consequences arise from his false information, he suffers a moral crisis.And maybe that's where the movie stumbles. That moral crisis is never made explicit, and the movie gets sidetracked into a revenge storyline as Guinness plans the murder of another agent out to get him. The film isn't as playful as the book, so it's not very funny when it should be, but since it doesn't examine the more serious themes inherent in the story as thoroughly as it could, there's nothing to fill the gap where the humor used to be.This film isn't exactly a misfire, but it's certainly no "Third Man."Grade: B

It doesn't quite work. It should, since Graham Greene himself has adapted his novel for the screen, but there is something lacking. The jokey tone between comedy of the black variety and tragedy, or at least drama, sits somewhat uneasily between satire or black comedy or drama or a combination of all three. Still, this Graham Greene adaptation, directed by the great Carol Reed, offers several pleasures. It's a good yarn, this tale of a mild-mannered vacuum-cleaner salesman, English but domicile in Cuba, talked, rather too easily, I felt, into becoming a spy and who then invents tales of espionage in order to keep his easily earned salary rolling in. It's a dangerous game he's playing; we know it even if he's oblivious, so it comes as no surprise to us when things take a darker turn and finally people start to die for real.On paper, Greene's smart, quick-witted turn of phrase made the change in gear from a sharp, satirical jab at the espionage novel to something closer to the truth, believable. Too many espionage novels trade in clichés whereas Greene's, which wasn't really about spying at all, showed just how dirty a business it could be when reality intervened. He declared it 'an entertainment' and, while it was certainly entertaining, it was also realistic. Reed's film version isn't realistic, not the situation and not the characters.I never, for a moment, believed in Alec Guiness' Wormold; not in the easy-going way in which he took to the task in hand like a duck to water nor in his later development of a conscience. Alec Guiness is a fine actor, one of the finest, but he isn't Wormold and I think, fundamentally, it's Guiness' performance that lets the film down. Nor did I believe in Maureen O'Hara's 'secretary', a very unlikely bit of romantic interest. O'Hara is beautiful and she is feisty but she is also dumb and hardly the agent to keep Wormold in line. For the film to work, these are the characters we must believe in above all others. It's up to them to persuade us that all of this could happen; that it isn't just 'a joke', but somehow it's beyond the players and I was never convinced.The supporting players, on the other hand, are splendid. Ernie Kovacs graduated from a good comic actor to an excellent serio-comic actor with this movie and, as the doctor who finds himself an unwilling as well as an unlikely 'spy', Burl Ives is as good here, if not better, than he was in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" or "The Big Country". As the film's 'real' spies Ralph Richardson and, especially, Noel Coward are marvellous although it is they who take the brunt of the satirical jibes; Richardson mixing up the East and the West Indies and Coward sauntering through Havana like a London City gent complete with obligatory umbrella. Coward gets the film's best lines and he delivers them superbly. For these players alone the film is worth seeing and Oswald Morris' excellent wide-screen black and white photography certainly brings the place to life. It's just that, funny as they are, the jokes are out of place. Now, if only John Le Carre had written this.

From the first shot, of Noel Coward in a dark suit and hat, tightly rolled umbrella, and immobile face striding down a Havana street besieged by grinning musicians and beggars, we know what we're in for: a story of chilly British imperturbability undermined by Latin misrule. The usual way this happens is through love or lust, but this movie has a subtler and darker theme--an amusing fantasy, in a dictatorship, turns into something seriously and horribly real.Attracted by the money that secret-service work will bring, but clueless as to how to do it, Wormold (Alec Guinness), a vacuum-cleaner salesman, makes up reports inspired by comic strips. But not only does London take them seriously--so does the other side, which has cracked his code.Our Man in Havana starts out as a comedy, but the humour turns to satire and then to a very black comedy indeed. Wormold's spy stories result in misunderstanding, then embarrassment, then murder, until he is put in a position where, though it's the last thing he wants, he has to become a hero, perhaps a dead one.An irony that went unappreciated at the time was of Alec Guinness expressing his disgust of homosexuals in one scene and, in another, being comically mistaken for one (in a maneuver shown him by Noel Coward!).Not many big laughs, but lots and lots of knowing and rueful smiles are what this movie inspires--it's a very dry martini in a world of brightly coloured alcopops.