Leofwine_draca
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.
bkoganbing
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.
Robert J. Maxwell
Carol Reed directed some matchless films, "The Third Man" among them. He was capable of clunkers too, like "The Public Eye." This one is somewhere in between but probably closer to "The Third Man." At any rate, it's light years ahead of most of the junk showing up on screens today, though they cost a million times more.Alec Guiness, in a performance both effective and casual, runs a vacuum cleaner shop in Bautista's Havana. He's not doing that well. The palmetto bugs object to the noise. His daughter, Jo Morrow, though is now a budding seventeen-year-old in a convent school and has expensive tastes. And Guiness wants to send her to school in Switzerland, an expensive proposition. In other words, Guiness finds himself in a dilemma common to us non-millionaires, in a vice whose heads consist of expenses and income.But his life changes. He's contacted by the prim, cautious Noel Coward who wants to hire him as a spy for the British Secret Service. Guiness sensibly pooh-poohs the proposition until Coward mentions the salary, at which Guiness gulps and nervously accepts.Coward explains the deal. Guiness will receive his tax-free salary and just "keep an eye on things", sending regular reports to London. He will also have to hire his own agents, who will also receive salaries through Guiness, and who will submit regular reports.A dream come true for the impecunious vacuum shop proprietor. Giddy with delight, he begins making up the names of agents, picking them from phone books and dance hall placards. Pressed for specific information, he draws a picture of one of his vacuum cleaners, claims it is based on the report of one of his agents, that it is a huge installation in the mountains, and sends that in.Regrettably, London takes the report seriously, although Coward remarks tentatively that it looks a little as if it's made up of vacuum cleaner parts. The Chief, Ralph Richardson, admits that it does, but why not build a giant vacuum cleaner as a weapon? The revelation is important enough for London to send an experienced agent and cryptographer, along with staff and equipment, to Havana, where all lodge in Guiness's cramped quarters. His chief assistant is Maureen O'Hara.Somewhere around the point of no return, the story turns rather serious. The Havana constabulary get wind of the operation. And there is "another side" that tries to assassinate Guiness. A couple of deaths, one of them tragic, precede the ironically happy ending.It's usually billed as a comedy and I guess it is, but don't expect to laugh out loud at any of the dialog or scenes. They're smile worthy but low key. A good deal of the humor depends on Guiness's performance and he delivers. But, again, the pace is never frantic. I'll give two examples.When Coward recruits Guiness, he takes him into the men's room of one of the local bars, where he checks for hidden microphones, turns on the taps, and makes Guiness hide in one of the stalls so that, should anyone enter, Coward and Guiness won't be seen together. That's pretty ridiculous in itself, but it gets worse when Guiness tries by himself to recruit an engineer as one of his agents. He approaches the astonished man in the men's room and tries to coax him into one of the stalls while explaining that he'll tell the engineer what to do later. The engineer mistakes Guiness's intentions.The preceding paragraph was a single example of the humor, though it may look like two. Here comes the second example. It's short. Ready? After the story takes a serious turn, Coward invites Guiness to lunch al fresco and tells him matter-of-factly that persons unknown are out to kill him by poisoning him. Guiness is in the middle of slurping a Planter's Punch and does a semi-spit take. Carol Reed frames the shot of Guiness so that he's almost hidden by a bankful of lillies in full bloom. (Kids: Lillies? Funerals?)Oh, well. Let me add that just before this exchange, in a practiced gesture at keeping their conversation hidden, Coward gets up and closes the door between the bar and the tables outside, but the door, like the wall, is nothing more than a few poles of bamboo criss-crossing wide open space.Whether or not it was intended as a comment on Noel Coward's own proclivities, everywhere he goes, dressed like a British gentleman, he's accompanied by an enthusiastic band of mostly young musicians playing guitars and singing, "Donde Va?" Maureen O'Hara is remarkable. She looks magnificent, for one thing. And this is twenty-two years after her film debut. And it's her finest performance, one of the few in which she's cast as something other than a caricature. What a woman.The movie's well worth seeing, keeping in mind that this is not an Ealing comedy or some kind of farce.
