“Our Man in Havana” (1959)

Ten years after their triumph with “The Third Man” writer Graham Greene and director Carol Reed collaborated again on “Our Man in Havana”.  Greene adapted his own satirical novel, the tale of Jim Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman strapped for cash who takes up an offer to become an undercover agent for the British secret service in Cuba.  Having no experience or real aptitude for the job Wormold draws on his imagination when writing reports, inventing a string of agents and fabricating a scenario involving hidden weapons that look suspiciously like giant hoovers.

Shot on location during the Cuban revolution the production received the personal endorsement of Fidel Castro.  It is not hard to see why.  Greene’s lampooning of his country’s intelligence community drew on years of first hand experience, and he manages to send up the ludicrous logic of the Cold War along with the peculiar mindset of British bureaucracy.  The satire might lack the bite of either Billy Wilder’s “One, Two Three” or Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr Strangelove” but it has a certain understated charm all of its own, parodying the myth of James Bond long before any Ian Fleming adaptations had hit the screen.

The cast is uniformly excellent.  Alec Guinness enjoys the last of his great comedic leading roles and is well supported by an eclectic array of international actors including Burl Ives (playing a German!), Maureen O’Hara, Ralph Richardson and a never better Noel Coward.