The third and final collaboration between writer Graham Greene and director Carol Reed, 1959's Our Man in Havana is never as tonally consistent or effective as their previous joint efforts, 1948's The Fallen Idol and 1949's The Third Man. The Greene novel was one of the author's self-described "entertainments," but it's got some grim stuff in it—not too grim, as his portrayal of pre-revolutionary Cuba soft-pedals the brutality of Batista's rule. The grim stuff, though, as you'd expect, isn't what the scrupulously sober Reed has much of a problem with.
No, it's the comedy that falters, coming on at first like a weak-tea variant of Ealing stuff before trailing off into near-nothingness. The Ealing tone is largely attributable to star Alec Guinness, whose presence helped define the likes of The Ladykillers, The Lavender Hill Mob, The Man in the White Suit and the more elaborate Kind Hearts and Coronets. Here Guinness plays Wormold, a mild-mannered expat Brit running a vacuum sales store in Cuba's capitol. He's got a avuncular cynical doctor (Burl Ives) for a drinking buddy and a coquettish teenage daughter (Jo Morrow) who's being eyed by the local police chief (Ernie Kovacs). Life's cozyish, but could be better, and so when home-secretary's-office type Hawthorne (a drolly officious Noel Coward) shows up and offers Wormald a tidy sum to do a bit of intelligence work under the store's cover, Wormold takes the money and...makes a bunch of stuff up, "inventing" fellow agents and submitting a blueprint of a vacuum cleaner's innards as the plan for a nuclear device. As happens in Greene tales, the hapless hero gets in a bit over his head, starting when a comely secretary (Maureen O'Hara) arrives from London eager to assist him.
This is all rather diverting but a little bland, actual Havana locations notwithstanding (the production was granted permission to film there in the early days of the Castro regime, the presumption being that the film would expose the awfulness of the prior regime; of course its interest is more in the time-honored tradition of polite British ineffectuality). You can tell things are getting serious when Reed starts breaking out the Dutch angles (as above, a lunch wherein someone's trying to poison Wormold). In other respects the movie plays pretty oddly. You get the sense that Reed has no idea of how to handle the issue of Captain Segura's obsession with Wormold's daughter Milly; of course it's grotesque, but the scenes wherein it's actually depicted are peculiarly flat, as if Reed finds them too distasteful to even comment on. Ernie Kovac's performance in the picture is kind of interesting. The comic, a great television innovator, was capable of great flights of performing exuberance, but his turn here is so straightforward one wonders why he was even cast in the first place.
Don't get me wrong, he is very competent (as he is in another "straight" role, in friend and frequent collaborator Richard Quine's underrated 1960 melodrama Strangers When We Meet) but it's peculiar that there's barely a hint of caricature in this putatively comic role.
Admirers of the film frequently cite the neon sign reading "BOND" that is frequently visible in early street scenes in the picture, for obvious reasons. Here you go.
The disc is a no-extras deal featuring a solid anamorphic transfer of the 2.35 black-and-white picture...not perfect though, as a sliver of image on the left side of the frame is missing, so that the copyright line at the bottom of the opening credit reads "olumbia Pictures..." etc.
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