Notre agent à La Havane

One of my favorite scenes is when Alec Guiness must get the chief of police (Ernie Kovacs) so drunk that he passes out. He arranges a game of checkers played with miniature bottles of scotch. You know,the kind served on airlines. Each time one is taken, it must be opened and drunk immediately. This leads to hilarious results. Guiness is excellent in the beginning for his famous "fusby" look. Meek, almost sheepish. Only when Kovacs is finally "knees up", can Alec Guiness complete his plan. (Watch the movie to see what this is!). This movie used to be a staple of late night television, before cable and the advent of talk shows, when movies reigned supreme. Of course, it was usually horribly butchered.

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

This movie is a good example of how a story can be carried by the force of the actors' skill and director's art rather than relying the science of special effects. The absence of "action" means that the audience's attention has to be held by the sheer force of the story line, the actors' interpretations of it and the director's presentation of the product as a whole.

It deals honestly with what intelligence gathering is. A mundane craft open to manipulation not only by governments but also by lowly operatives. Sir Alec Guinness, as he later became, portrays the ordinariness of the seedy characters who carry on this trade. Ernie Kovacs gives a splendid presentation of the laid back but sinister not so secret policeman while Burl Ives is as powerful as ever.

The pre-Castro Cuban setting is well portrayed and one can almost feel the tropical heat as the cast of misfit characters go about there subterfuge business.

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.