Unser Mann in Havanna

Sir Alec is, as always, magnetic. Guinness described himself as someone who liked to put on the mask, preferring to live someone else's life in order to keep his own private. Here his character tries to do something like that, with mixed results.

What is it about Guinness that makes it so hard to take our eyes off him? This role is, in a way, a variation on Col. Nicholson: the simple soul who discovers, a little too late, that he has understood nothing. In both cases their innocent acts start a chain of events that comes close to tragedy (but for Hollywood endings), and yet we never think of blaming either character for what they have brought about.

On the contrary, it's hard not to feel that Wormold deserves all of his undeserved good fortune, which appears to come at no cost. And even after Greene's story dispels that illusion, we still feel that his decency ought to count for something, even if his intentions were less than pure.

You can read this movie as an allegory for the common delusion on the part of great powers that they can direct events to their liking. If so, then Guinness has, even without the tacked on ending, subverted it. And even if we know better, it is hard not to cheer for him.

Filmed on the eve of Castro's revolution in Cuba, this movie is noteworthy simply as a timepiece to Havana in the late 50s and as one of the last great British comedies from the Ealing Studios era. Guinness is perfect as Wormold the bumbling vacuum cleaner salesman turned spy who's invented intelligence reports become only too real.

The casting of Burl Ives and Ernie Kovacs (as German doctor and Cuban police chief respectively) are inspired genius. The glaring exception is Jo Morrow as Wormold's daughter Millie who has been turned into an `American' for the movie and just comes off as annoying, thus undermining Wormolds motivation for his actions. Thus lies the films fundamental flaw. As a book, `Our Man in Havana' is believable. The movie adds an undercurrent of absurdity (aided by Noel Cowards foppish asides and Ralph Richardson's incompetent blundering), without drifting into full comedic genre, which works well but for a few moments of slapstick and the throwaway ending. But there is more than enough here to appreciate. Carol Reed recalls his Third Man/Orson Welles street shadows during the final chase sequence, the music beautifully evokes a vintage Cuba and the cinematic setting oozes the paranoia and drama of the script. As an adaptation of the novel it remains satisfying and is perhaps one of the better adaptations of a Greene novel. All told this movie stands repeated viewing and I urge anyone to track it down.

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.

Although most Americans have little knowledge of his work other than Star Wars, Alec Guinness produced an amazing body of work--particularly in the 1940s-1950s--ranging from dramas to quirky comedies. I particularly love his comedies, as they are so well-done and seem so natural and real on the screen--far different from the usual fare from Hollywood.

This spy farce is about a man who is a paid spy in Cuba during the latter years of the Batista regime. The problem is, he has absolutely no idea what he is doing and is in way over his head because he is NOT a trained spy--just some guy dumped into the role despite his objections. So how do you think he should deal with this dilemma? Of course, make up EVERYTHING and pretend you are doing your job. The problem is, he is too good at it and the lies take on a life of their own! This comedy is a bit silly at times and unbelievable compared to some of his earlier work, but it is still an excellent film. Don't be put off by mediocre reviews that came out since its release--it's well worth your time.

"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