our man in havana

Produced three years before Dr. No changed the spy thriller forever - and only a few months after Castro's revolution - Our Man in Havana (1959) is an entirely different sort of cloak-and-dagger affair. Bitingly satirical of the British secret service and cleverly playful towards the genre as a whole, Graham Green's script finds the perfect personification of Hitchcock's "Man Who Knew Too Much (or, in this case, too little) in Alec Guinness, a mild-mannered vacuum salesman recruited by MI6 to become a spy for Queen and country. But what begins as a lark to make extra cash winds up coming with a hefty bill to pay.

Jim Wormold (Guinness) is content enough with his dwindling customer base in pre-revolutionary Cuba, but his blossoming daughter has attracted the attention of an infamous local official, Captain Segura (Ernie Kovacs). So when a rather conspicuous British agent (Noel Coward) offers $150 a month in exchange for setting up a network of fellow informants, Wormold agrees. Unfortunately, his recruiting skills (usually combined with alcohol) aren't up to the challenge, so Wormold simply invents a cadre of agents under his command, choosing random candidates from the local country club...and cashing more paychecks for himself.

After passing off a series of sketches (based on vacuum cleaner parts) as a new enemy weapon, the home office (led by a wonderfully clueless Ralph Richardson) takes interest and sends him a support staff, including secretary Beatrice Severn (Maureen O'Hara). With his financial future at stake, Wormold is forced to take his deception to entirely new levels of complexity...deceptions that result in some very real danger to himself and those around him.

Directed by Carol Reed, who'd already shot two Green adaptations - The Third Man and The Fallen Idol - the duo fall into perfect step here with the casting of Guinness. Playing off the oh-so British sense of ethics and honor, the character of Wormold proves to be a much more honest interpretation of the cinematic spy: a man more concerned for himself than his country. But Wormold's journey from clueless patsy to clever manipulator is so entertainingly brought to life by Guinness that the film deftly turns from farce to drama and back again. A dinner scene where Wormold, warned of a poisoning attempt, switches his plate like a comic shell game while the assassin tracks it around the table is executed to perfection.

Our Man in Havana is full of ingenious moments like that, uncomfortable exchanges and inconvenient coincidences of Wormold's own making arranged for maximum effect. Greene's script is aided and abetted by a cast of seasoned pros (I haven't even mentioned Burl Ives as a rather tragic expatriate) who save their most stinging performances to mock the endless levels of ineptitude within British intelligence. Is it a case of truth being stranger than fiction? When the fiction is this much fun, the politics can wait.

Twilight Time's 3000-copy limited edition Blu-ray is another beautiful black-and-white transfer breathing new life into the Cinemascope photography. Extras include an isolated score track, theatrical trailer and liner notes.