Our Man in Havana

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Our Man in Havana another Carol Reed movie, from the Graham Greene novel and screenplay. Satire of cold war made in late 1950s – by the time they made it, the Cuban revolution had come, so they had to add a disclaimer before the titles.

Cuba, late 50s: Alec Guiness is a vacuum salesman who doesn’t make enough money to give his teenage daughter the rich life he wants for her. His wife has left them long ago.

He is offered the job of being a spy in Cuba for extra money, and for the sake of his daughter he agrees, only after his friend tells him he can just invent all the reports and agents who are supplying him with information.

At first it’s a big joke, and he enjoys it. The service pays his entry into the country club, his daughter gets a horse, and he’s on top of the world. But then he takes things a bit too far, drawing ‘secret military installations’ based on parts of his vacuum cleaners.

British intelligence takes this serious, and sends him a secretary, radioman, they want photos of the installations, etc. The Other Side also are spying on him, and they believe all this too, because british intelligence does. Before he knows it people are getting killed, and his own life is in danger. Somehow he must get out of it. He makes a clean confession to his secretary (with whom he’s fallen in love) and avenges the death of his friend, before being expelled from Cuba.

Upon returning to London, expecting a long prison term for treason, he is shocked to find himself promoted, given an official decoration, and the whole thing hushed up – nobody wants to admit they were fooled by a vacuum cleaner salesman. He sends his daughter to Switzerland finishing school, and goes off to marry his secretary.

It’s cute, but the best moments are the scenes where he goes to avenge his friend. Carol Reed shows himself far more sure of himself in directing suspense than comedy. The comedy itself is typically british, rather dry, restrained, no Jim Carrey-style broad slapstick, no fart jokes, no cursing, no pratfalls.

Shot in Cinemascope in black and white on soundstages with some exteriors done in what looks like a Caribbean country. The dvd unfortunately doesn’t capture the black and white correctly, scenes shift from bluish to beige-ish, which is distracting.

Guiness is good as always but it’s Ernie Kovacs as the hated ‘red butcher’ police captain who steals the picture.

It’s odd but 20 years or so later Alec Guiness would star in a series of television series as George Smiley, the master spy of John Lecarre.

She left them because she’s fed up with poverty?

It’s very strange – and written by an obviously older man, no younger man or woman would have written it this way. Guiness has been left by his wife, years ago, for no good reason that we learn. And secretary’s husband left her years ago for no good reason too. So they are both abandoned but still married with no idea where their spouses are. And at the end of the story they walk off hand in hand.

(written around 9 March 2009)