Our Man in Havana (1959) - film review

Jim Wormold is a modest vacuum cleaner salesman in Cuba, just a few years before the revolution.  He attracts the attention of fellow Englishman Hawthorne, who invites him to work for the British secret service.  In exchange for a handsome salary he must recruit further agents and send in regular reports about suspicious developments in the area.  Wormold is initially reluctant to get involved but agrees when he realises that the money will allow him to indulge his daughter Milly’s expensive whims, which include membership of the Country Club, a haven for the island’s millionaires.  Having proven to be hopeless as a spy, Wormold takes the advice of his friend Dr Hasselbacher and begins to fabricate his reports, based on bogus information from imaginary contacts.  Wormold’s superiors are so impressed by his reports, which include sketches of a new super-weapon resembling a vacuum cleaner, that they send another agent, Beatrice Severn, to assist him.  Wormold is on the point of confessing everything when his elaborate charade begins to come true...

A decade after their first collaborations on two landmark British films The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949), director Carol Reed and writer Graham Greene pooled their resources one more time and delivered another classic of British cinema, albeit one in a much lighter vein.  Greene reworked his recently published novel Our Man in Havana, an idiosyncratic study in identity against a backdrop of British colonial decline, into a highly amusing spy parody, showing a flair for dry comedy that came as a surprise to many of the writer’s admirers.  Reed’s experience with comedy was also comparatively limited - he was far better known for his realist dramas and noir thrillers - and so it is doubly surprising that he and Greene should concoct between them one of the funniest British films of the 1950s.

Alec Guinness is perfectly cast as the hapless Englishman abroad who finds himself embroiled in a web of intrigue, largely of his own making.  As ever, Guinness is all the funnier for downplaying the comedy, almost to the point that he gives an entirely straight performance, allowing the laughs to come from the increasingly absurd situations that his character finds himself in.  As the mood of the film darkens, so the comedy takes on a blacker hue, and there is a point near the end where we become unsure whether we are watching a comedy or a serious thriller.   As Wormold’s fiction turns into grim reality, the film suddenly resembles The Third Man, with Reed once again making use of titled camera angles and high contrast photography to suggest the dark labyrinthine world of the lone secret agent.  The film’s tongue-in-cheek ending takes a broad comic swipe at the kind of self-serving political one-upmanship that was (and still is) endemic in British government departments, whilst simultaneously blowing a well-timed raspberry at British pretensions to be a major colonial power.

© Alex Sullivan 2011

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