Review – Our Man in Havana

Carol Reed and Alec Guinness team up to produce one of the great dark comedies of the Cold War. Guinness stars as a British vacuum cleaner salesman who runs a small shop in Havana. One of England’s Caribbean-based spymasters recruits our reluctant hero into the intelligence service, a job he takes on because he needs the money. However, he has no luck at all recruiting agents for the spy network he’s expected to create. On the advice of a friend, he begins making up contacts and intelligence, including drawings of a military project hidden in the Cuban hills and a device that bears a suspicious resemblance to a vacuum cleaner. When things inevitably go horribly wrong, the movie appears to be playing out as a stylish but simple comedy of errors. Then people start dying, and the production takes a turn for the grim. Overall the blend of comedy and drama is brilliant, emphasizing the simultaneous dead seriousness and inherent absurdity of international espionage. Worth seeing