Set in Cuba shortly before the revolution (and filmed there after), Our Man in Havana stars Alec Guinness as a man reluctantly persuaded to spy for Britain. He shows no talent for the job, but a considerable talent for making things up.There's a point in the middle of the film, as his lies become amplified by competing factions, that I thought what had been a rather sedate but interesting start was going to move into hilarity. But instead the movie became less comedic after that point. Unfortunate the dramatic elements aren't all that interesting. The movie seems to know that, as it keeps a lot of dramatic threads sketchy. But that just makes the drama weaker; Burl Ives character is never properly explored, and a romance late in the film flowers out of virtually nothing.The movie is well-filmed (at times it's reminiscent in style to director Carol Reed's masterwork The Third Man) and has some good performances (Ernie Kovacs is quite good as a genial yet brutal police captain), but much of it feels like a lost opportunity to push it's brilliant satirical premise to the dark comedy it seems so capable of.

To me Our Man In Havana was a strange film. It would have been far better had it been played more broadly and for satire. The potential was there, the cast actually a perfect one for it. But instead the film was played seriously.What an incredible premise. MI6 always on the lookout for agents and they can be recruited in a variety of ways spots expatriate vacuum cleaner salesman Alec Guinness living in Havana with his daughter Jo Morrow is scraping by on his job and it's expensive sending Morrow to a Catholic Convent school.Along comes Noel Coward from British Intelligence with a proposition some extra income to work for them and recruit other agents and send back reports on loose information he picks up. And he has to recruit other agents to report to him with them getting a stipend from MI6. It takes his good friend Burl Ives to show him the possibilities there. Ives is a German expatriate living in Havana as a doctor since the 30s. Invent stories, make up agents, pocket their stipends this could be a real money maker.I'm sure you can see the possibilities there for broad comedy. Yet though some laughs are here, it gets deadly serious when the other side expresses an interest in killing Guinness because his reports to British Intelligence are giving the reputation to Our Man In Havana as one of the best they have.One thing the British take pride in is their spy service. Since the days of Francis Walsingham who developed it for Queen Elizabeth I this something they take seriously. So of course when Guinness is finally found out to be a fake, they've got quite the conundrum.Also in the cast are Maureen O'Hara who said that she and Guinness got along well during the shoot in Cuba which was right after the Revolution of 1959. She even met Che Guevara there and was impressed by him. She and Guinness both devout Catholics always attended mass together.Ernie Kovacs plays a lecherous Cuban police captain who has his eyes on Jo Morrow. He's not sure what Guinness is about but he knows he's up to something. For the price of Morrow he'll cover for Guinness. O'Hara said that the new Cuban government watched the shooting of this film with intense scrutiny and wanted it made clear that Kovacs was a Batista supporter. Kovacs was the kind who would have been shot right off when Castro took power.Although Our Man In Havana is well done it misses being a classic. What Mel Brooks could have done with this plot though.

"Our Man in Havana" is a underrated, but brilliant film. Alec Guinness as ever, is excellent, as is Noel Coward and Ralph Richardson.The re-voles around Jim Wormold(Alec Guinness) as a vacuum cleaner salesman in pre-revolutionary Havana. Here he meets Hawthorne(Ralph Richardson) a recruiter of spys. He wants Wormold to spy for Britain, and to recruit a "network" of secret agents. Having no idea on how to recruit an agent, Wormold simply invents a list of spys, and makes up information his "spys" are supposed to have discovered. Of course it all gos terrible wrong, and at the end of it, you suddenly realise you have been watching an extremely funny black comedy.A must see film.

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.