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.

OUR MAN IN HAVANA is a fairly typical British satire of the spy genre, with Alec Guinness playing his usual hapless character whose supposedly clever plans lead him into hot water. Guinness plays a salesman living in Cuba who is tasked with becoming British spy, but when he starts making up fake identities to impress his employers, he soon finds the situation spiralling out of control. Although this is a well-cast movie with solid direction from Carol Reed and some well-judged turns in support from famous faces, I found it far less funny than I was expecting and not up to the same quality as the Ealing comedies.

Jim Wormold (Alec Guinness) is an expatriate Englishman living in pre-revolutionary Havana with his teenage daughter Milly (Jo Morrow). He runs a small vacuum cleaner shop while Milly is busy shopping. The latest being a horse. So he takes a job from British secret agent Hawthorne (Noel Coward) to recruit people for his spy network. He is hopeless in the effort. So his friend Dr. Hasselbacher (Burl Ives) suggests inventing everything. He even delivers a drawing of secret machinery based on a vacuum cleaner.This takes quite a few fun pointed jabs at the spy world. Hawthorne is conspicuously English. He is possibly the worst spy. This is the perfect antidote for a James Bond thriller. Alec Guinness is brilliant playing this seriously letting all the jokes come naturally. All the while, there is a threat of danger that is all too real.

This picture is based on one of Graham Greene's "entertainments" (Greene's term) but is more satire than thriller. However, things do turn dark at the end. Every one of Graham Greene's novels contains a moral dilemma which the protagonist must face. Most also have a fair amount of his (decidedly leftist) political views, for Greene was both a Communist and an Anglo-Catholic. In a few off moments in this film, some these views are expressed but by secondary characters, not by Jim Wermold the protagonist himself. Captain Segura the police chief, played to chilling perfection by Ernie Kovacs, expounds on the "torturable classes" in society, ending with the pronouncement that torture is always "by mutual agreement". {Tell that to the American pilots tortured by the North Vietnamese!] True or not, this is a restatement of Marxist dogma: history as class struggle.Later, Maureen O'Hara as the secretary sent out by Intelligence headquarters in London, on learning that all of Wermold's reports to Home Office were fabrications and that he has taken their money on false pretenses, asks why people must be loyal to countries, anyway and isn't it better just to be loyal to people. This is also is a restatement, this time of a famous quote from E.M. Forster, that if he had to choose between betraying his country and betraying a friend, he hoped he would have to courage to betray his country.While these seemed to be mere philosophical musings in 1958, we know looking back that there was a great deal of active betrayal of Britain and its intelligence services right up to that time by former members of a student group at Cambridge University which did include E.M. Forster--though not Graham Greene, an Oxonian.Perhaps Graham Greene had mixed feelings about Americans but his detestation of the United States was undisguised. He saw America as run by an exploiting Big Business class with the government in Washington a sham, exercising no real power. Any cruelties or injustices practiced in Latin America were naturally attributable to this country and the rapacious businessmen who ran it, in his view. Celebrated for his inventive comedy, Ernie Kovacs played such a convincing Latin that his work here might have led to a second career as a dramatic actor had he not had that fatal traffic accident a few years later.