Worth seeing for its inventive opening—a wordless exchange between a Havana couple which pauses in freeze frame for the credits—Our Man in Havana ultimately fails to capture the bitter breeziness of Graham Greene’s 1958 novel. (Never mind that Greene also wrote the screenplay.) Alec Guinness stars as a British expat and vacuum cleaner salesman who is reluctantly recruited by his country’s intelligence agency. To keep the paychecks coming, he invents all sorts of ridiculous espionage, which his superiors eat up with a spoon from thousands of miles away. It should have been a plum part for Guinness, given his brilliance in something like Kind Hearts and Coronets, but he feels oddly restrained and reluctant to embrace the potential farce. Much of this was remarkably filmed on Havana’s streets shortly after the 1959 revolution, and director Carol Reed brings the same off-kilter eye to the city’s alleys that he did to Vienna’s sewers in The Third Man (also written by Greene). But Our Man in Havana required a far more playful touch. With Burl Ives, Maureen O’Hara, Ernie Kovacs, Ralph Richardson, and Noel Coward.
(3/26/2025)
