A quick look at the list of ingredients and the people involved would probably be enough to convince most people that 1959’s Our Man in Havana was going to be a cracker – but it isn’t. It’s a cake full of good things that isn’t, in itself, a good cake. Pity.
The promising components include Graham Greene’s screenplay, the presence of Carol Reed as director – these two had already given the world The Third Man and The Fallen Idol – Alec Guinness in a lead role, plus excellent support players including Noël Coward, Ralph Richardson, Burl Ives and Maureen O’Hara, with location shooting in Cuba just post the Castro revolution and cinematography by Oswald Morris, a master of his craft.
All the elements, on their own, purr away beautifully in a story that is a masterly little thing about a British vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana called Jim Wormold (Guinness) being recruited to spy for the mother country by the starchily supercilious Hawthorne (Coward). It immediately becomes clear that Wormold isn’t cut out for the work – too timid – and so instead of establishing a network of informants he yields to a suggestion by one of those shady Graham Greene characters, Dr Hasselbacher (Ives), and starts making it all up, sending fake information back to London gathered by a network of agents that doesn’t exist.
In a case of the simulacrum replacing reality, Wormold has soon become a valuable asset and is being rewarded handsomely for his spying work by a country that is clearly losing its global grip. And he has no reason to stop. He’s doubly incentivised, in fact. The money buys Wormold an ex-patriate lifestyle of daiquiris in swish Havana clubs and it also means he can also get his too-sexy-by-half, convent-educated daughter, Milly (Jo Morrow), off the island and to a Swiss finishing school. There she’ll be far away from Captain Segura (Ernie Kovacs), the lascivious local police captain with designs on young Miss Wormold. A well known torturer, Segura is, perhaps even more worryingly in Wormold’s eyes, not an “anglo-saxon”.
Greene got the idea for the story after watching German agents in Portugal during the Second World War, who’d write up fictitious reports and send them back to Berlin, then get back to the sunloungers and beers. He blamed Jo Morrow for the film’s poor reception but it’s not her fault.
On paper Our Man in Havana starts off as a breezy lark and becomes increasingly dark but Carol Reed doesn’t seem to be able to shift its register away from the light-hearted even as Wormold’s life comes under threat. Guinness’s playing of Wormold remains blithe – he’s in Ealing comedy mode – Frank and Laurence Deniz’s soundtrack is steadily jaunty and the odd expressionistic camera angle (reminiscent of The Third Man) isn’t enough on its own to suggest menace.
The Havana locations are a real plus, with Reed et al shooting literally weeks after Fidel Castro had taken over, the new regime being only too happy to endorse a film all about the monstrosities of the old regime. DP Oswald Morris captures it all lovingly, the gorgeous bars, the wide streets, the bustling nightclubs, in pristine wide-screen black and white.
There is no real reason for Maureen O’Hara to be in this film, except as a lure to attract American audiences. That nervousness also led to the casting of Americans Jo Morrow and Burl Ives, who’s playing a German, but not so much that you really notice.
For all its many pluses, this is a good idea that’s not been translated into a good film. A much better realisation of something similar can be found in Claire Denis’s 2022 movie Stars at Noon, where a corrupt police state also forms the backdrop to a story about bluffs being called and poses being exposed.
Our Man in Havana – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
