Our Man in Havana

Wormold sells vacuum cleaners in Havana, does not earn enough, and his daughter's demands keep growing. British intelligence offers to make him an agent. He knows nothing, so he invents: he creates sources who do not exist and sends drawings of vacuum cleaner parts as plans of a secret military installation. London takes it seriously. The subject is not espionage but institutions confirming to themselves what they want to hear. The more absurd the material Wormold sends, the more excited London gets. Then the people he invented start actually dying. The form begins as comedy and cools: the shadows increase, the jokes thin out, and by the last section death is real. The Havana material was shot in real streets shortly after the revolution. The source is Graham Greene's novel and Greene wrote the screenplay himself. He had worked for British intelligence during the war and knew first-hand how fabricated agent reports functioned. Carol Reed and Greene had previously worked together on The Third Man. Alec Guinness plays Wormold, Burl Ives his doctor friend and Maureen O'Hara the secretary sent from London, with Noël Coward and Ralph Richardson also in the cast. Who it is for: viewers who like Cold War satire and Graham Greene adaptations. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a single tone; the film hangs between comedy and tragedy for a while as it crosses over.