SYNOPSICS
Our Man in Havana (1959) is a English,Spanish movie. Carol Reed has directed this movie. Alec Guinness,Maureen O'Hara,Burl Ives,Ernie Kovacs are the starring of this movie. It was released in 1959. Our Man in Havana (1959) is considered one of the best Comedy,Crime,Drama,Thriller movie in India and around the world.
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. Wormold hasn't got a clue where to start but when his friend Dr. Hasselbacher suggests that the best secrets are known to no one, he decides to manufacture a list of agents and provides fictional tales for the benefit of his masters in London. He is soon seen as the best agent in the Western Hemisphere but it all begins to unravel when the local police decode his cables and start rounding up his "network" and he learns that he is the target of a group out to kill him.
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Our Man in Havana (1959) Reviews
My idea of paradise
My idea of paradise would be sitting down with a DVD boxed set of Alec Guinness comedies from the 1950's. What will it be tonight? The Man in the White Suit, or The Ladykillers (both by Mackendrick)? Or Kind Hearts and Coronets, where he played eight parts to perfection? No, tonight will be Our Man in Havana, the blackest of black comedies, directed by Carol Reed from Graham Greene's novel. The tone of confusion and mounting panic, the sense of things sliding hopelessly out of control is perfectly caught by Reed, who had already given us the classic The Third Man. The casting is very good. Noel Coward, Gregoire Aslan, Ferdy Mayne and especially Burl Ives as Hasselbacher, the most reluctant of spies are all impressive. Maureen O'Hara is a Rolls Royce when a Morris would have done for this story, but she plays well. I liked Ernie Kovacs as Segura, the brutal police chief; he had a nice vulgarity blended with sensitivity that worked for me. Now my pleasure would be complete if this picture were available on DVD, and if IMDb would give us the memorable quotes this film abounds in. Like Segura: "one never tortures except by a kind of mutual agreement", or Beatrice's description of her estranged husband: "He was very beautiful; he had a face like a young fledgling looking out of the nest in one of those nature films..."
Can great Spies and Secret Agents have great imagination?
Graham Greene, with his unfaltering sense of reality and irony, plays no favorites in the world of espionage. He knew (as Eric Ambler did, and as John Le Carre did) that no country is really an innocent - that all countries have guilty secrets that other countries (for purposes of self-interest, including security and economic strength) have to discover. Keeping this in mind one easily has the situation in OUR MAN IN HAVANA. Alec Guinness is Wormold, an Englishman who runs a vacuum cleaner agency in Havana, Cuba in the late 1950s (actually before Castro seized power). He lives with his daughter Jo Morrow, who has some spending habits of her own. He does not make much money, and is in debt. He is approached by British Secret Service official Noel Coward to become a British agent, reporting on Cuban military information for a monthly stipend. Guinness agrees reluctantly because of his debts, but he really does not know how to develop a spy ring. Coward gives him some vague tips that he takes up, but he fumbles them. He attempts to approach some local Cubans he knows from his social club, and they think he is trying to come onto them. Soon he is joined by Maureen O'Hara, who is to be his "bookkeeper"/assistant, but was sent by Coward and his boss Ralph Richardson. Struggling to make something to report about his activities, Guinness starts lying. He makes it sound like he was successful getting those Cuban gentlemen to be his information gatherers. But worse, he decides he has to prove he found something. He notices that the vacuum cleaners, if taken apart and blown up a huge number of times, they look like odd buildings for scientific or military purposes. He sends these to England, and Richardson is deeply impressed, although he does comment that one would think they look like parts of a vacuum cleaner. Coward happens to hear this while he is behind Richardson, and suddenly realizes what Guinness is sending. But he keeps quiet. There are people who are suspicious of Guinness. O'Hara catches on early, but she has fallen in love with Guinness and is keeping (despite misgivings) quiet. But the local police chief (Ernie Kovacs) is aware - after hearing of the approaches Guinness was making to those local fellows, that Guinness was recruiting spies. However, Kovacs (for his own reasons) is mum about this - he is interested in getting Guinness's agreement for him to marry Morrow (who doesn't like him). Guinness's closest friend, a former German army officer played by Burl Ives, also figures out what is going on, and willingly sells his information (or a variant of it) the the Russians. Soon Guinness finds his seemingly harmless fraud is actually dangerous. Coward comes to see him to warn him that the Russians are so impressed at Guinness's "successful" discovery of military secrets that they have decided to silence him by assassination, most likely poisoning at a public dinner Guinness has to attend of vacuum cleaner salesmen. Guinness manages to figure out who the threatening Russian agent is, but he is unable to prevent one murder. In seeking to avenge it, Guinness has to allow Kovacs to outwit himself in a checker game (you'll see what I mean). Guinness, according to the biography by Piers Paul Read, was not happy about his performance in OUR MAN IN HAVANA. He and director Sir Carol Reed (THE THIRD MAN's director) disagreed on how Guinness should play Wormold (his character), and Sir Alec said he lost interest in it. He also did not feel comfortable with Kovacs and Ives. Noel Coward, in his diaries, did not like Ives, who he said was a bore. But still the performances are highly watchable (in Coward's case it is one of his best film roles), and the Greenean irony stays on until the end of the film. It is a clever movie, and well worth watching.
Classic Guiness!
One of my favorite scenes is when Alec Guiness must get the chief of police (Ernie Kovacs) so drunk that he passes out. He arranges a game of checkers played with miniature bottles of scotch. You know,the kind served on airlines. Each time one is taken, it must be opened and drunk immediately. This leads to hilarious results. Guiness is excellent in the beginning for his famous "fusby" look. Meek, almost sheepish. Only when Kovacs is finally "knees up", can Alec Guiness complete his plan. (Watch the movie to see what this is!). This movie used to be a staple of late night television, before cable and the advent of talk shows, when movies reigned supreme. Of course, it was usually horribly butchered.
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.
Classic Carol Reed
A GREAT MOVIE: classic performances, despite some miscasting with the women. The film never has any trouble deciding what it will be, despite the fact that some viewers seem put off by the shading of genres. Some of the comments above referring to a "weak" screenplay or Guinness's inability to fully develop the role only reveal how taste has changed over the years. This is classic British humor, of the black variety, very underplayed, as it always was done before the Brits succumbed to American taste. While his treatment is lighter than the book, Reed (a man, by the way, as others have noted) captures the wry cynicism of Greene perfectly. The film displays touches of the same sensibility that produced "The Third Man," which also contained humorous moments (The literary party for Holly Martins). Reed's juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy, while unsettling to some, is the essence of his profound commentary on "the spy game." As mentioned above, this deserves a DVD!!!