Our Man in Havana

1959

Action / Comedy / Crime / Drama / Thriller

7
IMDb Rating 7.2/10 10 6679 6.7K

based on novel or book cuba spy salesperson black and white single father

Plot summary

Jim Wormold is an expatriate Englishman living in pre-revolutionary Havana with his teenage daughter Milly. He owns a vacuum cleaner shop but isn’t very successful so he accepts an offer from Hawthorne of the British Secret Service to recruit a network of agents in Cuba.

Director

Carol Reed Photo
Carol Reed

Top cast

Aileen Lewis Photo
Aileen Lewis as Nightclub Patron
Ernie Kovacs Photo
Ernie Kovacs as Capt. Segura
John Le Mesurier Photo
John Le Mesurier as Louis - Waiter
Timothy Bateson Photo
Timothy Bateson as Rudy
720p.BluRay 1080p.BluRay
982.09 MB
1280*544
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 47 min
Seeds 1
1.78 GB
1920*816
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 47 min
Seeds 10

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by bids2650 8 / 10

A splendidly acted movie about "real" spying before the genre was established. The Government's ready and willing acceptance of misinformation is chillingly relevant in light of the recent Iraq ma

This movie is a good example of how a story can be carried by the force of the actors' skill and director's art rather than relying the science of special effects. The absence of "action" means that the audience's attention has to be held by the sheer force of the story line, the actors' interpretations of it and the director's presentation of the product as a whole. It deals honestly with what intelligence gathering is. A mundane craft open to manipulation not only by governments but also by lowly operatives. Sir Alec Guinness, as he later became, portrays the ordinariness of the seedy characters who carry on this trade. Ernie Kovacs gives a splendid presentation of the laid back but sinister not so secret policeman while Burl Ives is as powerful as ever. The pre-Castro Cuban setting is well portrayed and one can almost feel the tropical heat as the cast of misfit characters go about there subterfuge business.
Reviewed by slokes 7 / 10

Games With Agent 59200/5

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.
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