Our Man in Havana
by Carol Reed
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Alec Guinness, Burl Ives, Ernie Kovacs, Maureen O'Hara, Noel CowardDirector: Carol Reed
Brand: SONY PICTURES HOME ENT
Writer: Graham Greene
DVD: Region Code 99
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); English (Original Language)
Format: Black & White, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 111 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2009-02-03
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Sony Pictures
Movie Reviews of Our Man in Havana
Movie Review: Tine Capsule
Summary: 4 Stars
In this rather peculiar story, the British government has concerns about Cuba and wish to employ a British subject who already resides in Cuba to set up a spy network. Their recruiter arranges to meet a likely prospect: Mr. Wormold, a local shop owner.
Mr. Wormold makes a modicum of money selling vacuum cleaners, but not enough money to support his grown daughter's love of horse riding and his desire to send her off to a safer part of the world. So, when the Secret Service recruiter promised him significant money, he agrees to become a part-time spy.
Mr. Wormold has a problem: there is simply nothing, that he is aware of, in Cuba worth reporting on. At the suggestion of a friend, he begins making up outlandish reports from his fictitious Cuban sources on a revolutionary weapon being built in the rebel-controlled mountains. It would make the H-bomb look like just a conventional weapon.
Mr. Wormold soon has another problem: others are beginning to take notice of his activities, and unfortunately for Mr. Wormold, they don't deal in make-believe weapon systems, but in guns, poison, and accidental murders ...
Some movies are like forgotten time capsules. This 1959 film gives us a glimpse of life in Cuba before Fidel Castro. Havana was no paradise, but a thuggish police-state where intimidation, torture, and death were the razor-edged tools of the state.
Overall, I found this movie interesting. It is difficult to categorize. Although it has comic elements, it is not a comedy, but perhaps you could call it a comic film noir.
Extras: Movie trailer and Martini Minutes: two brief films which start with a hodgepodge of movie clips, an ingredients list for an alcoholic drink, and finally a plug for several movies.
Picture (DVD): good.
Summary of Our Man in Havana
A vacuum cleaner salesman (Alec Guinness) is recruited by the British secret service to act as a spy in Havana. When Guinness sends off phony reports, "recruits" mysterious agents and "discovers" mysterious installations, the home office decides to send him some help in the form of an agent named Beatrice.Carol Reed's 1960 adaptation of Graham Greene's satiric Cold War novel (Greene also wrote the screenplay) is simultaneously funny and scary, a microcosm of profiteering under the shadow of nuclear war and a grim comedy about the lengths to which men will go to uphold a useful ruse. Alec Guinness plays Jim Wormold, a low-key, English expatriate and vacuum cleaner salesman living in pre-revolutionary Havana, Cuba, with his daughter, Milly (Jo Morrow). Short on funds, Wormold accepts an offer from a British spy recruiter (Noel Coward) to keep a clandestine eye on Cuban activities, a job for which Wormold has no experience. Anxious to keep the home office happy, Wormold sends schematics of vacuum cleaners he declares are blueprints of secret weapons, and creates fictional agents who appear to send in field reports suggesting something is amiss on the island. Espionage head "C" (Ralph Richardson) is pleased with Wormold's progress, but when the former sends out a beautiful handler (Maureen O'Hara) and a possible assassin turns up at a sales convention, Our Man's faux hero has to think fast to keep up his charade--and stay alive. Ernie Kovacs is excellent as a corrupt police chief trying to win Milly's heart by appealing to her father, and Burl Ives has never been better than as a German expat with a mysterious background. Reed has a superb grasp of the tone and pacing of this spy comedy, with its surges of genuine darkness--he did, after all, give the world the much-less-funny The Third Man. --Tom Keogh
Stills from Our Man in Havana (Click for larger image)
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