Bill Slocum Comedy and espionage make uneasy bedfellows in this Alec Guinness vehicle. Viewers should expect more of a morality play than a gleeful farce.Guinness frequently played characters leading double lives. Here we see his character Wormold tripped up by one that may cost him his life. Wormold is a vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana who is approached by a fellow named Hawthorne (Noel Coward), alias Agent 59200, who wants Wormold to serve the British Secret Service "for $150 a month and expenses" as his subagent, 59200/5, collecting secret information regarding pre-Castro Cuba.Encouragement for this comes not only indirectly from his love for his spendthrift daughter Milly (Jo Morrow) but more directly from his best friend, a castoff German doctor named Hasselbacker (Burl Ives), whose advice forms the heart of the message from screenwriter Graham Greene, adapting his own novel:"That sort of information is always easy to give. If it is secret enough, you alone know it. All you need is a little imagination...As long as you invent, you do no harm. And they don't deserve the truth."The joke, which is also the story's tragedy, is Wormold invents too well, convincing not only his London paymasters but the opposition of his fiction's veracity. Director Carol Reed famously made a spy film, "The Third Man," which blended tragedy and comedy in equal measure. This time, the comedy is more front-and-center, but efforts at creating a light tone conflict with the more serious message and various characters' fates. "Our Man In Havana" struggles at times with what kind of film it wants to be.Perhaps Guinness's own difficulty with his part contributes to this confusion. He reportedly found Reed's instruction ("Don't act!") unhelpful. Ives is especially heavy for the film's most delicate part, making it oppressively sad; I wish that Reed's collaborator Orson Welles could have taken this part and invested it with some of his trademark cunning and craft.Much of "Our Man In Havana" does work, and well. Oswald Morris's cinematography employs actual Havana locations to great effect, using unusually angled shots of the crumbling, sun-drenched city. You feel the tension of Wormold's world in every scene. Ernie Kovacs, a hero of early TV comedy, gets a lot out of a thanklessly straight part, the menacing but sensitive Segura, who lusts for Milly and explains his position with real sensitivity even though he never loses the cruelty of the character."Do you play checkers, Mr. Wormold?" he asks."Not very well," answers Wormold."In checkers, one must move more carefully than you have tonight."Wormold isn't kidding; he only knows enough to lose. In a world this topsy-turvy, it proves the right approach.Coward does much to serve the comedy, which would be almost entirely absent without him. His recruitment of Wormold, which is played like a seedy homosexual liaison in bars and men's rooms, is a riot when one knows not only Coward's own legendary proclivities but his friendship with that master of spy fiction, Ian Fleming. Some of the film is even set in Fleming's own Jamaican stomping grounds; one can imagine the creator of James Bond must have enjoyed this send-up of his work before it was a gleam in Albert Broccoli's eye."Our Man In Havana" plays with your mind and conscience for an hour and a half. It capably establishes a dark mood with cheerful undertones though it would have worked better vice versa, which was my takeaway from reading the novel. Anyway, it's intelligent, entertaining, and worth a look.

thinker1691 Back in the 1950's many changing aspects of life in Cuba were in their infancy. Fidel was still spouting histrionic rhetoric, the British government was striving to remain among the elite of world governments and the U.S. was trying hard to ignore the tiny imprisoned island. Here is one movie which captured the essence of the times. The film is called " Our Man in Havana " and is the story of the British secret service prior to the first James Bond movie. Noel Coward plays Hawthorne a government official seeking to establish a covert base on the Island of Cuba. Finding one Jim Wormold (Alec Guinness) a British subject, running a vacuum sales shop, he enlists him to create a spy network complete with agents and code names. Completely ill suited and inexperienced for the post, Wormold is advised by his friend Dr. Hasselbacher (Burl Ives) to accept all the money, privileges and perks which come with the post and just make up a network of spy and secret weapons. He is so successful, London (Ralph Richardson) sends him Miss Beatrice Severn (Maureen O'Hara), a beautiful secretary to help him with emerging operations. However, due to the accumulating power of the agency in Cuba, the heavies too become dangerously threatening, in the guise of Capt. Segura (Ernie Kovacs). The movie has a comedic, but dark veneer as things begin well enough, but then become lethal. A surprising hit for it's time and one reminiscent of the years in which it was created. ****

evanston_dad "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

ianlouisiana Adapted by Graham Greene from one of his own "entertainments"i.e. potboilers,"Our Man in Havana" succeeds entirely due to its cast.Sir Noel,Sir Alec,Sir Ralph all enjoy themselves and undoubtedly trousered nice cheques from Oliver Reed's uncle into the bargain. Set in the time Mob Money virtually ran Cuba,the story of a salesman who agrees to spy for his queen and country and make a few bob at the same time is a thin thing indeed.Mr Reed attempts to make a silk purse out of it and very nearly triumphs. Before the Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis,Cuba hardly featured on most people's radar.Havana was as mysterious as Timbuktu.Into this Heart of Darkness strolls an imperious Mr Noel Coward,scattering natives left and right with his rolled umbrella.Mr Alec Guiness,needing some spare cash for his spendthrift daughter agrees to spy for him,makes up a ring of agents and collects all their wages for himself. A man clearly destined to work in The City,one might think. Mr Reed has a lot of fun with this premise,the film is moodily shot in black and white and is,fittingly,quite entertaining but essentially lightweight and forgettable as an "Aero" bar that has melted in your mouth. Distance has lent enchantment to a movie that was very much of its era. When Gary Powers was shot down over Russia in his U2 a little while later,spying suddenly became less of a game,more of a deadly gamble.