Our Man in Havana (1959)

Along with The Third Man and The Fallen Idol, Our Man in Havana is one of the three highly successful pairings of writer Graham Greene and director Carol Reed. Based on Graham's 1958 book of the same title, and set in Cuba before the communist revelation (which actually broke out while the crew was in the country filming), Our Man in Havana centers on the character of  Jim Wormold (Alec Guinness), the proprietor of a small vacuum cleaner business in Havana. Wormold had come to Cuba nearly two decades prior, had fallen in love with a local women and had a daughter, who after his wife ran off he raised alone. As the films action begins daughter Milly (Jo Morrow) is a teenager who desperately wants a horse and who has attracted the romantic interest of the much older police Captain Segura (Ernie Kovacs). Wormold is approached by a British agent named Hawthorn (Noel Coward) who wants to recruit him to be British intelligence station chief in Cuba. Wormold doesn't want to get involved but the promise of money, which would allow him to give his daughter things that right now only Captain Segura can provide peaks his interest. Totally unfamiliar with the spy game and unable to recruit local agents as instructed, Wormold goes to his old friend the ex-patriot German Dr. Hasselbacher (Burl Ives) who tells him that if he can't find real agents and intelligence, he should just make some up. This works well for a while, but eventually Wormold creates "intelligence" so big, in the form of  large, secret, unknown machines that look a lot like vacuum cleaners hidden in the mountains, that he attracts unwanted attention both from his own side and from the enemy, both of whom think his reports are real.

This is an old troupe, but its exceptionally well handled and works in no small part due to Guinness performance. I often find Sir Alec to be on the hammy side when he does comedy, but here he plays it fairly straight. The efforts of his character in desperation to keep the charade up are quite entertaining, but not as much as the desire of others to believe them, mostly endearingly that of Beatrice Severn (Maureen O'Hara) a women sent from London to be his secretary, but also Ives who first told him to fake his reports, but after a going over by "the enemy" starts to believe there real. In the end Wormold gets to be pretty good at the spy game once he learns that an enemy agent posing as a rival vacuum cleaner salesman (Paul Rogers) is out to kill him. A very enjoyable piece of satire that works well as action adventure, comedy, and even drama. Greene and Reed do not disappoint. ***1/2