SimonJack While this film has serious and somber moments in a couple of places, it is one of the best spy spoof movies ever made. It's based on the novel of the same title by Graham Greene. Director Carol Reed did a superb job with the film's cast in polishing the comedy of the plot. The story is slow and deliberate at the start, and the comedy is very tongue-in-cheek. The humor comes in the situations and the scheming by Jim Wormold, played by Alec Guinness. His deadpan expressions are particularly suited for the satire of this plot. Wormold is an expatriate British citizen who's been a resident of Havana, Cuba, for 15 years. He owns a vacuum cleaner store. The cast for this wonderful satire couldn't have been better chosen. Guinness is in the lead role as the British secret service's recruited man in Havana. Burl Ives plays his best friend, Dr. Hasselbacher, himself an expatriate from Germany. He's also been living in Havana a long time. After Wormold confided the British offer to the doctor, Hasselbacher suggested that he create an imaginary network of agents and make up things to report to agent 59200, his boss. That role is played hilariously by Noel Coward as Hawthorne. He is the head of British operations in the Caribbean. From the first moment one sees Coward's character, early in the film, you know you're in for a delightful time. His expression is even funnier than Wormold's. Coward is serious and dour. With his suit, bowler hat and umbrella, he stands out like a sore thumb amid the street throngs of Havana. He doesn't blend in with the populace, and his brisk, deliberate walking pace makes him all the more easy to spot – and follow. Enter the chief of police, Capt. Segura, played by Ernie Kovacs. This is one of those roles in which Kovacs' character is calm and unruffled, and it, too, is particularly apropos for a spy spoof. At the head of the whole British "intelligence" operation – in the London home office, is Ralph Richardson as "C." Other characters fill in the secret service bunch in London. The rest of the cast are all superb, especially those with parts in Cuba. Jo Morrow plays Wormold's daughter, Milly. Maureen O'Hara plays the British agent, Beatrice Severn, whom London sends to help Wormold. Fredy Mayne is hilarious as Prof. Sanchez whom Wormold tries to recruit initially. Paul Rogers plays Hubert Carter, Wormold's would-be assassin. This is one very funny film that lampoons the British secret service mercilessly. The satire continues to build right to the end with a surprise finish that caps the mockery beautifully. Again, most of the humor is in the scheming, plotting and situations rather than in the dialog. The script at the end, though, has a running pun that wraps it up nicely. After Wormold has been given the boot by the Cuban police, and is in London with Severn, Hawthorne says to C, "The loss of those two will create quite a vacuum." C, "What?" Hawthorne, I'm most frightfully sorry, sir. I really didn't intend to make a pun. I only thought, perhaps, that if we are to make a clean sweep …"The movie was filmed in Cuba and England. The Havana scenes are around Cathedral Square and the Havana Biltmore Yacht and Country Club. It's interesting to see photos around the square after the Cuban Revolution (1953-1959). Cam shots today show very little human traffic and activity, and deterioration of the buildings. The movie prologue quickly points out that the story takes place and the movie was made there in the days "before the recent revolution." The movie came out in 1959, just after the end of the revolution that installed Fidel Castro at the head of a communist government. Thus, the Cuban filming would have been shot before July 1953. So, besides its wonderful satire of British espionage and government offices, "Our Man in Havana" gives some snapshots of life and street scenes in the once vibrant capital of Cuba. At one point, Wormold says to Carter, "Everything is legal in Cuba." Indeed, besides its high society and cultural side, the Havana of the mid- 20th century was known as a place where morals were subdued in favor of pleasure. This is a very clever satire, even though it's on the dark side in places. It's one of the best adult films (because of its content) that spoof government "intelligence" operations. It makes a fine addition to any film library.

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.

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

Martin Bradley 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.