Our Man in Havana

 A very dark, absurdist comedy Our Man in Havana is an oblique precursor to Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove released five years later in 1964.  Our Man in Havana is shot in high-contrast black and white, alternating between lurid expressionism and documentary realism -- this is exactly the photographic style that Kubrick uses.  Further, the themes of both films are related:  Our Man in Havana is an eerie and prescient precursor to the Cuban missile crisis -- the film's plot involves a supposedly advanced atomic weapon hidden in Cuba's Sierra Madre; of course, Kubrick's movie exploits anxieties about nuclear Armageddon current in the early sixties.  Both films are about the idiocy of the military-industrial complex.  Strangelove is more apocalyptic but both movies posit that our collective existence is dangling by a hair manipulated by forces motivated by deceit, lust, and greed.

Alec Guinness plays Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman eking out a meager living in Havana, a place that has only intermittent electrical power.  Wormold's wife has run away leaving him with a feisty and self-absorbed teenage daughter.  It is very expensive for Wormold to maintain his daughter's life-style -- she is a convent-educated spoiled brat who makes Wormold buy her a horse and, then, join the country club so that she will have a place to ride.  Even worse, she is being courted by Captain Segura, a greasy-looking gendarme with a reputation for torturing people -- he has a villainous moustache and is ferried around in a big limousine by thugs; the part is played, more or less, straight by the great comedian Ernie Kovacs.  Noel Coward dressed in suit and bowler hat comes calling on Wormold and recruits him as an MI 5 agent, a spy serving the British government as "our man in Havana."  Coward seduces Guinness' Wormold in a  toilet at the Country Club and, throughout the movie, spy encounters take place in rest rooms, leading to the suspicion that the cell of informants also comprises a network of homosexuals.  Coward's recruiter gives Wormold some invisible ink and instructs him in a "book code" sending messages by references to pages and letters in Charles Lamb's Stories from Shakespeare.  Wormold proves to be an incompetent agent, although the extra money that he earns makes him sufficiently prosperous to support his daughter's profuse spending.  Under pressure to recruit more operatives, Wormold simply names people in his circle as his associates and claims that they are working for him.  The spymasters in London obligingly send him more money to pay for his country club membership and to reimburse the new agents that Wormold has invented.  Wormold satisfies London's demand for more information by providing elaborate schematic pictures of vacuum cleaners that he represents as large and sinister weapons hidden in the mountains.  London is impressed and sends Wormold an attractive secretary, Beatrice, and a radio operator named Rudy.  When Wormold is supposed to introduce Beatrice and Rudy to his agents, he contrives a plan to keep the non-existent spies off-stage.  But, then, someone starts murdering the people whom he has identified as  agents, even though in fact they are hapless patsies.  In fact, this adversary spy network plots to kill Wormold by poisoning him at a vacuum-cleaner retailer's convention -- Wormold escapes although an unfortunate dachshund eats the poison and expires.  Captain Segura is nosing around and Wormold plays checkers with him using little airplane-sized bottles of whisky and bourbon.  When you take your opponent's checker piece, you have to drink it.  Segura gets blind drunk (he's a better checkers player than Wormold) and Guinness steals his revolver.  He, then, meets the enemy agent who tried to poison him, a fellow who, in fact, seems to be a homosexual, and squires him around Havana's night spots.  At last, he guns down the enemy agent in a very poorly edited and confusing sequence.  The fraud, Wormold, is summoned to London to meet with the big bosses at MI 5.  Realizing that exposing Wormold will make them all look foolish, the spymasters decide to honor the film's hero, admitting him to the Order of the British Empire.  Wormhold gets to canoodle with his attractive secretary and his daughter, now more adult, has outgrown her horse and is ready to cut a swath through London's young men.   

This is all light-weight genial stuff, although there is a subplot with Burl Ives playing a German emigre to Havana that is more serious in tone and, in fact, tragic.  Ives takes the role of Karl Hesselbacher, someone who fled from Germany in 1934, and who works as a doctor in Cuba.  Due to his association with Wormold, he is mercilessly persecuted by both the thugs in power (the film takes place on the eve of Castro's revolution) and, also, by the enemy, presumably Soviet, spy network.  Ives is affecting as the German healer and alchemist -- he's working on some kind of formulae for blue cheese.  At first, the regime (or the enemy spies) smash his laboratory and, then, he's gunned down in an open-air bar to which he and Wormold have often retired to drink daiquiris.   Hesselbacher fancies himself a kind of virtuous soldier -- as he is persecuted, he dons his WWI vintage pickelhaube and the pointed helmet is set on his casket when he is buried.  

Carol Reed stages the night-time scenes with canted camera angles and violently expressionistic shadows and light -- the scenes of Havana at night with its lurid-looking arcades, prostitutes, and flaring streetlights looks like footage from Welles' Touch of Evil.  It is flamboyantly spectacular and, also, of course, similar to Reed's imagery in The Third Man, a picture to which Our Man in Havana seems to have been intended as pendent.  Reed stages nightclub scenes with crowded tapestries of squirming female flesh and many of his interiors are jammed with people, costumes, and weird bric-a-brac to the extent that the imagery often resembles Pabst in The Love of Jeanne Ney or Three-penny Opera.  The street life in Havana is affectionately observed.  Coward's straitlaced British businessman is always flanked by musicians serenading him and there are lottery numbers displayed in the bars, jovial blind men and all sorts of half-naked girls cavorting in front of orchestras playing the habanera.  It's a great-looking movie and very well acted but just a little bit off, as it were; something indefinable is lacking.   The movie was shot in Havana in the months after Castro took power.  Fidel visited the set and reportedly chatted with Alec Guinness. The wide-screen format is beautifully used in an opening sequence in which a brawny stevedore gets eyed by a voluptuous hooker, approaches her, and, she flips him an piece of fruit that she has been eating -- the arc of the fruit extends all the way across the screen to where the stevedore is standing, defining the width of the frame (this shot freezes to let us contemplate the amorous couple and the celluloid distance between them.)  Watch carefully and you will see them strolling the streets in some of the later scenes.