DVD Chronicle: Our Man in Havana, and: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and: Young and Innocent, and: La Ronde, and: Le Plaisir, and: The Earrings of Madame de, and: City Girl (review)

Burl Ives, Noël Coward, Maureen O’Hara, Ralph Richardson, Ernie Kovacs, and Alec Guinness, not to mention Rachel Roberts in a tiny uncredited part: an improbable cast list for a film, one would say, a fantasy or a joke, and yet it is quite real, the roster of American and English players assembled in 1959 for Our Man in Havana, scripted by Graham Greene after his own novel, and produced and directed by Carol Reed. This is a film which has long been unavailable, making its recent appearance on DVD, and the manifold pleasures it offers, all the more welcome.

The cast works well together. Guinness takes the lead as Jim Wormold, a middle-aged salesman of vacuum cleaners in Batista’s Havana, who in order to spoil his teenage daughter (convent-raised, but longing for a horse) allows himself to be recruited as a British spy. The recruiter is played by Coward; the recruiter’s boss in London by Richardson; Wormold’s dipsomaniac German friend Hasselbacher by Ives, for once not required to bring his guitar and folk-song act to the set; the threatening Cuban policeman Captain Segura by Kovacs, who keeps his comic flamboyance well down but does get to smoke cigars; and Wormold’s secretary Beatrice by O’Hara. Beatrice falls gradually and quite believably in love with Wormold, but not with the “intelligence” he cables in cipher back to London, since that is entirely fictitious, as fictitious as the list of Cuban subagents who supply it. That ominous new military installation out in the mountains, which so excites the boffins in Whitehall and earns a generous bonus for our man in Havana? It is nothing but Wormold’s sketch of one of his Hoovers.

Clearly, with Our Man in Havana, we are situated in the moral terrain Greene made familiar in book after book. It is a place where secret services, whether “theirs” or “ours” it makes no matter, are equally inhuman and ridiculous, and where the loyalty that matters is not to countries but to other people (“to love,” Beatrice says, adding that she doesn’t think any one country “means all that much”). Hard-nosed political reality in the twentieth century is “not something to be faced,” Hasselbacher observes sadly, standing at the bar and facing not much more than the glass in his hand and his own great paunch. The mise-en-scène of the film is recognizably Greeneland too, though in its louche rather than seedy aspect: a Havana full of lottery-ticket sellers, whores, pimps, and street urchins through which Guinness as Wormold passes in crumpled white tropical suitings with a preoccupied frown or a Holy Fool’s smile on his face, while the Cuban police patrol in their big-finned American sedans. Our Man in Havana, a few cuts aside, is very faithful to its source novel; Greene was accustomed to working hand in hand with Carol Reed, who of course had directed the two brilliant Greene adaptations of the late 1940s, The Fallen Idol and TheThird Man. The novelist and the director planned Our Man in Havana together in Brighton, and Greene was present for location shooting in Cuba in March, 1959, a process complicated by the recent victory of the Fidelistas, who in their puritanical way insisted on toning down some of the story’s loucheness and covering up some of the nightclub dancers’ nudity. According to Greene’s biographer Norman Sherry...