"Your profession has quite a natural air"
In the last few months, I've been on something of a Graham Greene binge. After the engrossing but gloomy thrills of "The Confidential Agent," "The Tenth Man" and "The Ministry of Fear," the comparatively lighthearted tone of "Our Man in Havana," first published in 1958, proved a welcome surprise. The story evolved from a similar idea Greene had proposed during WWII, but he'd been advised against pursuing the project, apparently because his brief synopsis somehow gave away Official Secrets – was it the use of bird droppings as an invisible ink? More likely, it was because the British Secret Service didn't want to be ridiculed. Though taking place almost entirely in pre-revolutionary Cuba, the novel is less a commentary on that country's political situation than a blithe satire of meddling British politics. Director Carol Reed, who had worked with the author on two previous occasions – on 'The Fallen Idol (1948)' and 'The Third Man (1949)' – masterfully brings Greene's story to life, with an extraordinary liveliness only enhanced by the on-location filming in Havana, Cuba.Jim Wormald (Alec Guinness) is a British citizen who has lived in Cuba for fifteen years, and now, despite a rocky political climate, considers it home. Owner of an unsuccessful vacuum-cleaner business, Wormald's spare time consists of drinks with German doctor Hasselbacher (Burt Ives) and fawning over his beautiful teenage daughter Milly (Jo Morrow), who has reached that precarious threshold between childhood and adulthood. That, at least, was until ungainly Englishman Hawthorne (playwright Noel Coward) arrives in Havana to recruit agents for the Secret Service. Indifferent to British politics, Wormald accepts the offer for its monetary benefits, inventing nonexistent agents and reporting on ominous enemy weapons installations whose structures more closely resemble a giant vacuum cleaner than any known nuclear weapon. The British, of course, swallow every word of this hokum, but Wormald's fraud is thrown into turmoil when a secretary (Maureen O'Hara) is sent over to aid his investigations. Meanwhile, corrupt Cuban dictator Captain Segura (Ernie Kovacs), who covets the virginal Milly, begins to suspect that Wormald isn't as harmless as he had always seemed.
In post-revolutionary Cuba, Greene's novel was looked upon favourably for its depiction of the corrupt dictatorship of former leader Fulgencio Batista, but Fidel Castro complained that it didn't accurately capture the brutality of his reign. "In poking fun at the British Secret Service, I had minimized the terror of Batista's rule," Greene later wrote. "I had not wanted too black a background for a light-hearted comedy, but those who suffered during the years of dictatorship could hardly be expected to appreciate that my real subject was the absurdity of the British agent and not the justice of a revolution." It is, indeed, the British who come off second-best in Greene's satire. Agent Hawthorne carries himself with the outdated snobbish air of a Colonial gentleman, stalking stiffly through Havana like a beleaguered vulture, continually harassed by lively local buskers. Wormald's "treason" doesn't feel like a crime because his fraud, at least initially, is victimless, fuelling a passive "cold war" that amounts to little more than a round-table of paranoid British politicians arguing over the accuracy of information while pointing at the wrong map.
score 8/10
ackstasis 2 May 2009
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2060847/35080
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