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Rating: - Not to Be Missed!
Collaborating for a third time with director Carol Reed ["Fallen Idol"; "The Third Man"], Graham Greene has written a script, based upon his novel "Our Man in Havana," which effervesces like vintage champagne, its humor, both dry and subtle, radiating a brilliance that obscures the fact that this black-and-white film was made in 1957, during the height of the Cold War.

The unlikely plot to which John Le Carré would later pay homage with "Tailor of Panama," is made entirely plausible due to the nuanced performance of the incomparable Alec Guinness, whose portrayal of Wormold, the seller of "Atomic Pile Vacuums" in a seedy pre-Castro Havana, ranges between bemused ineptitude and faux confidence and sophistication as he improvises on the tradecraft of espionage, a profession that has been thrust upon him. Much of the humor, in fact derives from his bumbling efforts to recruit agents. The felicitous combination of Greene and Reed ensures that the humor gradually assumes ominous overtones as Wormold's deception is quickly swallowed whole by one side of the espionage game and slowly detected and regurgitated by the other. Given the fact that the film was made before the Cuban Missile Crisis, the drawings of "secret installations" in the heart of Cuba provides the viewer with a chilling verisimilitude in hindsight.

Burl Ives, who was noted primarily for folk-singing, turns in a more-than-competent performance as Wormold's enigmatic friend, a doctor and German First-World-War veteran, whose part in the affair is never completely explained. Although Ernie Kovacs' performance of the dastardly chief of police, Captain Segura, borders on caricature, one cannot imagine anyone else playing the character in any other manner. And while I was never quite convinced by Jo Morrow in the role of the precocious convent daughter--she seems a bit too mature--the rest of the cast, which includes Maureen O'Hara as the skilled secretary that London sends to back up their most valuable asset in the Caribbean, is thoroughly credible.

Only Graham Greene could concoct this deliciously sardonic spoof on the Secret Intelligence Service in which he served during World War II. All the fabled real-life stereotypes are present and accounted for: Noel Coward as an Old Boy who, impervious to the raucous importunings of maracas-wielding street singers, strides stiffly through the steamy boulevards of Havana in a three-piece suit, bowler hat on head and umbrella in hand; Ralph Richardson as "C," the all-for-expedience Director, who hears what he wants to hear (transforming what has been described to him as a smalltime salesman into a "merchant adventurer"); the stammering spy obsessed with his pipe (reminiscent of a notorious mole under whom Greene served in real life), working for the Other Side. All contribute a note of Cold War reality to this tongue-in-cheek tale of espionage. Underlying the humor, however, lurks a question, later asked by John Le Carré: are intelligence services sometimes too willing to believe in expedient scenarios that seem clearly delineated--and therefore too good to be true, when actual events may prove to be other than they seem.

Except for the original theatrical trailer, the extras are eminently trivial and not worth watching. This fact, however, should not prevent one from buying this DVD, which, presented in letter-box form, to preserve the original Cinemascope presentation, is not to be missed.

Enjoy!

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