You won't be disappointed!

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

This picture is based on one of Graham Greene's "entertainments" (Greene's term) but is more satire than thriller. However, things do turn dark at the end. Every one of Graham Greene's novels contains a moral dilemma which the protagonist must face. Most also have a fair amount of his (decidedly leftist) political views, for Greene was both a Communist and an Anglo-Catholic. In a few off moments in this film, some these views are expressed but by secondary characters, not by Jim Wermold the protagonist himself. Captain Segura the police chief, played to chilling perfection by Ernie Kovacs, expounds on the "torturable classes" in society, ending with the pronouncement that torture is always "by mutual agreement". {Tell that to the American pilots tortured by the North Vietnamese!] True or not, this is a restatement of Marxist dogma: history as class struggle.Later, Maureen O'Hara as the secretary sent out by Intelligence headquarters in London, on learning that all of Wermold's reports to Home Office were fabrications and that he has taken their money on false pretenses, asks why people must be loyal to countries, anyway and isn't it better just to be loyal to people. This is also is a restatement, this time of a famous quote from E.M. Forster, that if he had to choose between betraying his country and betraying a friend, he hoped he would have to courage to betray his country.While these seemed to be mere philosophical musings in 1958, we know looking back that there was a great deal of active betrayal of Britain and its intelligence services right up to that time by former members of a student group at Cambridge University which did include E.M. Forster--though not Graham Greene, an Oxonian.Perhaps Graham Greene had mixed feelings about Americans but his detestation of the United States was undisguised. He saw America as run by an exploiting Big Business class with the government in Washington a sham, exercising no real power. Any cruelties or injustices practiced in Latin America were naturally attributable to this country and the rapacious businessmen who ran it, in his view. Celebrated for his inventive comedy, Ernie Kovacs played such a convincing Latin that his work here might have led to a second career as a dramatic actor had he not had that fatal traffic accident a few years later.

Our Man in Havana (1959)A lovely movie, funny and trenchant in its own way, and a precursor to Dr. Strangelove with its wry criticism of the Cold War and government ineptness. In this case, it isn't the atom bomb at hand, but the spread of communism into the colonies--though, to be fair, I don't think the word communism ever comes up. Anyway, the simple trick of a recently hired agent trying to save his minor reputation by inventing things right and left, and having the upper levels not see through it, is hilarious. Yes it's implausible as shown, but the idea isn't so far fetched, and Alec Guiness, the protagonist, pulls it off with droll, steady humor and cleverness. Cuba, of course, was in upheaval, and the truth of the revolution in the hills became a dramatic revolution shortly before filming took place. For political reasons, a note declares at the start that the film is set before Castro's takeover, so the corruption shown would be attributed to the overthrown government. A terrific background is given at the TCM site here (www.tcm.com/thismonth/article/?cid=143178). The writing, by Graham Greene, is first rate, and keeps the farce in perfect balance, even with some of the secondary actors (Burl Ives, Noel Coward) hamming it up slightly. The director is the legendary Carol Reed (The Third Man) and between Guiness and him (and Greene), the movie has a British tilt--indeed, it was filmed mostly in Havana with followup work in Shepparton Studios, London. It's completely fun, well filmed, and if at times frivolous, maybe that's just a tonic for the times, and the real life drama of 1959 Cuba.

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.

It doesn't quite work. It should, since Graham Greene himself has adapted his novel for the screen, but there is something lacking. The jokey tone between comedy of the black variety and tragedy, or at least drama, sits somewhat uneasily between satire or black comedy or drama or a combination of all three. Still, this Graham Greene adaptation, directed by the great Carol Reed, offers several pleasures. It's a good yarn, this tale of a mild-mannered vacuum-cleaner salesman, English but domicile in Cuba, talked, rather too easily, I felt, into becoming a spy and who then invents tales of espionage in order to keep his easily earned salary rolling in. It's a dangerous game he's playing; we know it even if he's oblivious, so it comes as no surprise to us when things take a darker turn and finally people start to die for real.On paper, Greene's smart, quick-witted turn of phrase made the change in gear from a sharp, satirical jab at the espionage novel to something closer to the truth, believable. Too many espionage novels trade in clichés whereas Greene's, which wasn't really about spying at all, showed just how dirty a business it could be when reality intervened. He declared it 'an entertainment' and, while it was certainly entertaining, it was also realistic. Reed's film version isn't realistic, not the situation and not the characters.I never, for a moment, believed in Alec Guiness' Wormold; not in the easy-going way in which he took to the task in hand like a duck to water nor in his later development of a conscience. Alec Guiness is a fine actor, one of the finest, but he isn't Wormold and I think, fundamentally, it's Guiness' performance that lets the film down. Nor did I believe in Maureen O'Hara's 'secretary', a very unlikely bit of romantic interest. O'Hara is beautiful and she is feisty but she is also dumb and hardly the agent to keep Wormold in line. For the film to work, these are the characters we must believe in above all others. It's up to them to persuade us that all of this could happen; that it isn't just 'a joke', but somehow it's beyond the players and I was never convinced.The supporting players, on the other hand, are splendid. Ernie Kovacs graduated from a good comic actor to an excellent serio-comic actor with this movie and, as the doctor who finds himself an unwilling as well as an unlikely 'spy', Burl Ives is as good here, if not better, than he was in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" or "The Big Country". As the film's 'real' spies Ralph Richardson and, especially, Noel Coward are marvellous although it is they who take the brunt of the satirical jibes; Richardson mixing up the East and the West Indies and Coward sauntering through Havana like a London City gent complete with obligatory umbrella. Coward gets the film's best lines and he delivers them superbly. For these players alone the film is worth seeing and Oswald Morris' excellent wide-screen black and white photography certainly brings the place to life. It's just that, funny as they are, the jokes are out of place. Now, if only John Le Carre had written this.