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Alec Guinness Stars in Graham Greene's OUR MAN IN HAVANA

Our Man in Havana, the third and final collaboration between director Carol Reed and writer Graham Greene, makes a sardonic post-script to their great success, The Third Man. Like that film, it deals in espionage in an exotic hotspot (in this case, Havana, just as revolution was brewing in Cuba's jungles) where numerous world powers had interests, and features an innocent who manages to get in the middle of international scuffles. The difference is in the tone. Our Man in Havana is a dryly witty satire of the spy game.

Alec Guinness is Jim Wormold, a British vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana and the doting and devoted single father of a beautiful, spoiled teenage daughter (Jo Morrow). British Secret Service agent Hawthorne (a perfectly droll Noel Coward) picks, for reasons beyond the viewer, Wormold as the perfect choice to be his man in Havana. He appeals to Wormold's patriotism and duty but it's the income that sells Wormold; he wants to send his daughter to a fashionable finishing school in Switzerland, far away from the Havana hothouse and the attentions of the corrupt Capt. Segura (Ernie Kovacs, perfectly oily as the soft-spoken terror). Wormold turns out to be a lousy agent and a failure as a recruiter, but a terrific author. Failing to deliver the expected reports, he makes up a doozy of a secret agent yarn, complete with a cast of supporting agents (all in need of generous expense accounts) and a secret installation right out of a science fiction thriller. His fantastical reports are eagerly devoured by officers back home in London (Hawthorne is dubious but too concerned for his own reputation to point out the fabrications of his own agent) and the head of British Intelligence (Ralph Richardson, dryly officious) sends a staff to Havana to help Wormold oversee these exciting developments. Not exactly the response Wormold had hoped for. Maureen O'Hara plays the neophyte secretary who becomes quite attached to Wormold even as she learns the truth of his reports.

There's a deft wit to Greene script, which Guinness and the cast play perfectly, and plenty of humor at the expense of gullible intelligence officers. But the film takes a darker turn when the fantasies spun by Wormold take root in the spy community. His phony agents are based on real people, and one of them turns up dead. His apolitical best friend and drinking buddy, the world-weary German expatriate Dr. Hasselbacher (Burl Ives), gets caught in the middle of the intelligence turf war. And Wormold himself becomes a target of enemy agents and, out of necessity, becomes the real life espionage player he'd been posing on paper all this time. He's almost too good and confident in the transition, belying his amateur status and everyman vulnerability. But like Wormold himself, the film gives in to the fantasy to let him be a hero.

The inspiration for Graham Greene's original novel Our Man in Havana was his own adventures and observations when he worked for British Intelligence during World War II. He paints a decidedly unflattering portrait of the intelligence bureaucracy and the gullible leadership that eagerly accepts the most fantastic reports without a trace of skepticism. Amidst all that hubris and shameless self-promotion of the intelligence service leaders, Wormold's deceptions seem downright naïve and harmless in contrast. Technically it could be called treason, but Reed and Greene treat it mostly as simple creative license. For all the satire, this cynical look at the spy game in many ways anticipates the very serious work of John Le Carre – in fact, the basic plot and premise were reworked and updated by Le Carre for The Tailor of Panama – and Alec Guinness' Jim Wormold, the working class British spy, can be seen as a comic sketch of a man who will become Le Carre's decidedly mundane but thoroughly competent George Smiley, a character Guinness (under)played to perfection in the British TV mini-series Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley's People.

"This film is set in Cuba before the recent revolution," reads the text that opens the film. The script was indeed written during General Fulgencio Batista's reign and Reed and Greene scouted locations in Havana while Batista fought Fidel Castro's guerillas, but by the time they were ready to shoot, Batista had fled and Castro had won. It had little effect on the production, as it turned out. Greene had spent a lot of time vacationing in Cuba and reporting on the revolution and had met and befriended Castro. Castro supported the film and its unflattering portrait of Batista's regime and his poeple asked for very few changes, and even those were minor. Ernie Kovacs had grown a beard for the role of the corrupt police chief; when Fidel Castro came to power, the beard had become a symbol of revolutionary heroism and Kovacs was forced to shave it off. In return, Reed had the freedom to shoot all over Havana and contrast the bustling streets and bars of Havana's working class neighborhoods with the country clubs and exclusive retreats of the very wealthy. And while the film doesn't directly comment on the politics of Batista's Cuba, the corruption and totalitarian power of the government and its police are suggested in comments tossed off in the course of banter.

Carol Reed deftly directs Greene's dryly witty dialogue and brings a snap to the repartee, and he brings a very real sense of danger to the climax, where Wormold has to face the dangers he's brought down on himself. Its the transition between the two that is not so effective and Reed seems on wobbly ground when he tries to mix the tones. Yet the cast is uniformly excellent (with the exception of Morrow, who makes Milly a vacuous figure) and the black and white CinemaScope photography by the talented Oswald Morris is superb. (Morris went on to shoot the Le Carre adaptation The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and Reed's own Oliver! and won the Academy Award for Fiddler on the Rood.) He crisply captures the buzzing atmosphere of Havana, which he plunges into shadow for the nighttime climax. After Wormold plays a cunning game of checkers with Segura, using miniature bottles of liquor for pieces, Morris and Reed send the camera off-kilter, like a boat rolling through swelling seas, suggesting both the drunken instability of Wormold and the unsettled state of affairs caused by his fabricated intelligence reports.

Sony releases the film under it's vaguely defined "Martini Movies" banner, a collection of otherwise unrelated films that the studio frames with a mix of camp and nostalgia. Our Man in Havana doesn't really fit either of these definitions, but no matter, it's a good enough excuse to pull the rarely seen film out of the vaults and on to home video. The transfer is well done but there are no supplements to speak of, only the original trailer and a goofy "Martini Minutes" featurette, which is nothing more than a tongue-in-cheek promotion for the DVD series.

For more information about Our Man in Havana, visit Sony Pictures. To order Our Man in Havana, go to TCM Shopping.

by Sean Axmaker