OUR MAN IN HAVANA

On paper this 1959 adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel couldn’t fail. It reunites Greene with director Carol Reed some years after ‘The Third Man’ and it has the perfect casting of Alec Guinness in the lead role, a couple of years after he won an Oscar for ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’.

Guinness plays Jim Wormold, a humble seller of vacuum cleaners in Havana, who improbably is recruited by Noël Coward for British Intelligence.  Of course Wormold hasn’t a clue how to recruit agents or how to uncover secret information.  But a friend Dr Hasselbacher advises him to simply make up stuff, which it turns out that Wormold has a flair for, so much so that the bosses back in Whitehall get very excited about the drawings of secret weapons he sends them, little realising that they are based on vacuum cleaners. 

This is all good comedic entertainment, and every scene featuring either Coward, or Ralph Richardson as his boss, is a delight.

But when the story takes a darker turn as people start getting killed the film loses its way tonally.

For example, an attempt to poison Wormold is played mainly for laughs yet then it turns serious when Wormold lures the would-be-poisoner to a dark alley and shoots him dead.

The other problem this film has is the shoehorning of American actors into unsuitable roles, for understandable commercial reasons.

Burl Ives as Hasselbacher, making only a perfunctory effort at a German accent, is bad enough but even worse is Maureen O’Hara who is totally miscast as a secretary for Wormold, and I didn’t for one minute believe in the romance that develops between the two of them.  Nor did I believe that the local police chief would want to marry Wormold’s teenage daughter (played by Jo Morrow, another piece of miscasting). 

The film was shot in Havana so it has plenty of authentic atmosphere even if most of the goings-on seem phoney.

I studied the source novel as part of my 'O' Level English (using the word 'studied' loosely) but I can't remember much about it.  I'm guessing the film is more comedic, which seems to have been the choice of Reed, who overruled Guinness who wanted to play Wormold as a shabbier, more down-at-heel character. 

For whatever reason I found it disappointing overall but if you approach it with lower expectations than I did then it's entertaining enough.

RATING: ✓ Cheers