BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

GurlyIamBeach Instant Favorite.

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Justina The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

stevemaitland Carol Reed echoes the musical score and, at least latterly, the dynamic compositions of earlier Graham Greene collaboration The Third Man in this 1959 Cuba-set spy outing. Alec Guiness is well cast as Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman covertly recruited by a British Intelligence agent (Noel Coward). In humourous scenes Wormold then clumsily attempts to recruit others in the same manner - notably in a Gent's lavatory....After that I'm afraid I lost the thread. Too many spies and their associates to keep track of. But the film is a good watch all the same and you always get the gist of what's going on. The authentic Cuban setting - its people and customs milling around central characters - makes for a refreshing escapism too.

Charles Herold (cherold) Set in Cuba shortly before the revolution (and filmed there after), Our Man in Havana stars Alec Guinness as a man reluctantly persuaded to spy for Britain. He shows no talent for the job, but a considerable talent for making things up.There's a point in the middle of the film, as his lies become amplified by competing factions, that I thought what had been a rather sedate but interesting start was going to move into hilarity. But instead the movie became less comedic after that point. Unfortunate the dramatic elements aren't all that interesting. The movie seems to know that, as it keeps a lot of dramatic threads sketchy. But that just makes the drama weaker; Burl Ives character is never properly explored, and a romance late in the film flowers out of virtually nothing.The movie is well-filmed (at times it's reminiscent in style to director Carol Reed's masterwork The Third Man) and has some good performances (Ernie Kovacs is quite good as a genial yet brutal police captain), but much of it feels like a lost opportunity to push it's brilliant satirical premise to the dark comedy it seems so capable of.

Bill Slocum Comedy and espionage make uneasy bedfellows in this Alec Guinness vehicle. Viewers should expect more of a morality play than a gleeful farce.Guinness frequently played characters leading double lives. Here we see his character Wormold tripped up by one that may cost him his life. Wormold is a vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana who is approached by a fellow named Hawthorne (Noel Coward), alias Agent 59200, who wants Wormold to serve the British Secret Service "for $150 a month and expenses" as his subagent, 59200/5, collecting secret information regarding pre-Castro Cuba.Encouragement for this comes not only indirectly from his love for his spendthrift daughter Milly (Jo Morrow) but more directly from his best friend, a castoff German doctor named Hasselbacker (Burl Ives), whose advice forms the heart of the message from screenwriter Graham Greene, adapting his own novel:"That sort of information is always easy to give. If it is secret enough, you alone know it. All you need is a little imagination...As long as you invent, you do no harm. And they don't deserve the truth."The joke, which is also the story's tragedy, is Wormold invents too well, convincing not only his London paymasters but the opposition of his fiction's veracity. Director Carol Reed famously made a spy film, "The Third Man," which blended tragedy and comedy in equal measure. This time, the comedy is more front-and-center, but efforts at creating a light tone conflict with the more serious message and various characters' fates. "Our Man In Havana" struggles at times with what kind of film it wants to be.Perhaps Guinness's own difficulty with his part contributes to this confusion. He reportedly found Reed's instruction ("Don't act!") unhelpful. Ives is especially heavy for the film's most delicate part, making it oppressively sad; I wish that Reed's collaborator Orson Welles could have taken this part and invested it with some of his trademark cunning and craft.Much of "Our Man In Havana" does work, and well. Oswald Morris's cinematography employs actual Havana locations to great effect, using unusually angled shots of the crumbling, sun-drenched city. You feel the tension of Wormold's world in every scene. Ernie Kovacs, a hero of early TV comedy, gets a lot out of a thanklessly straight part, the menacing but sensitive Segura, who lusts for Milly and explains his position with real sensitivity even though he never loses the cruelty of the character."Do you play checkers, Mr. Wormold?" he asks."Not very well," answers Wormold."In checkers, one must move more carefully than you have tonight."Wormold isn't kidding; he only knows enough to lose. In a world this topsy-turvy, it proves the right approach.Coward does much to serve the comedy, which would be almost entirely absent without him. His recruitment of Wormold, which is played like a seedy homosexual liaison in bars and men's rooms, is a riot when one knows not only Coward's own legendary proclivities but his friendship with that master of spy fiction, Ian Fleming. Some of the film is even set in Fleming's own Jamaican stomping grounds; one can imagine the creator of James Bond must have enjoyed this send-up of his work before it was a gleam in Albert Broccoli's eye."Our Man In Havana" plays with your mind and conscience for an hour and a half. It capably establishes a dark mood with cheerful undertones though it would have worked better vice versa, which was my takeaway from reading the novel. Anyway, it's intelligent, entertaining, and worth a look.

thinker1691 Back in the 1950's many changing aspects of life in Cuba were in their infancy. Fidel was still spouting histrionic rhetoric, the British government was striving to remain among the elite of world governments and the U.S. was trying hard to ignore the tiny imprisoned island. Here is one movie which captured the essence of the times. The film is called " Our Man in Havana " and is the story of the British secret service prior to the first James Bond movie. Noel Coward plays Hawthorne a government official seeking to establish a covert base on the Island of Cuba. Finding one Jim Wormold (Alec Guinness) a British subject, running a vacuum sales shop, he enlists him to create a spy network complete with agents and code names. Completely ill suited and inexperienced for the post, Wormold is advised by his friend Dr. Hasselbacher (Burl Ives) to accept all the money, privileges and perks which come with the post and just make up a network of spy and secret weapons. He is so successful, London (Ralph Richardson) sends him Miss Beatrice Severn (Maureen O'Hara), a beautiful secretary to help him with emerging operations. However, due to the accumulating power of the agency in Cuba, the heavies too become dangerously threatening, in the guise of Capt. Segura (Ernie Kovacs). The movie has a comedic, but dark veneer as things begin well enough, but then become lethal. A surprising hit for it's time and one reminiscent of the years in which it was created. ****