Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

While this film has serious and somber moments in a couple of places, it is one of the best spy spoof movies ever made. It's based on the novel of the same title by Graham Greene. Director Carol Reed did a superb job with the film's cast in polishing the comedy of the plot. The story is slow and deliberate at the start, and the comedy is very tongue-in-cheek. The humor comes in the situations and the scheming by Jim Wormold, played by Alec Guinness. His deadpan expressions are particularly suited for the satire of this plot. Wormold is an expatriate British citizen who's been a resident of Havana, Cuba, for 15 years. He owns a vacuum cleaner store. The cast for this wonderful satire couldn't have been better chosen. Guinness is in the lead role as the British secret service's recruited man in Havana. Burl Ives plays his best friend, Dr. Hasselbacher, himself an expatriate from Germany. He's also been living in Havana a long time. After Wormold confided the British offer to the doctor, Hasselbacher suggested that he create an imaginary network of agents and make up things to report to agent 59200, his boss. That role is played hilariously by Noel Coward as Hawthorne. He is the head of British operations in the Caribbean. From the first moment one sees Coward's character, early in the film, you know you're in for a delightful time. His expression is even funnier than Wormold's. Coward is serious and dour. With his suit, bowler hat and umbrella, he stands out like a sore thumb amid the street throngs of Havana. He doesn't blend in with the populace, and his brisk, deliberate walking pace makes him all the more easy to spot – and follow. Enter the chief of police, Capt. Segura, played by Ernie Kovacs. This is one of those roles in which Kovacs' character is calm and unruffled, and it, too, is particularly apropos for a spy spoof. At the head of the whole British "intelligence" operation – in the London home office, is Ralph Richardson as "C." Other characters fill in the secret service bunch in London. The rest of the cast are all superb, especially those with parts in Cuba. Jo Morrow plays Wormold's daughter, Milly. Maureen O'Hara plays the British agent, Beatrice Severn, whom London sends to help Wormold. Fredy Mayne is hilarious as Prof. Sanchez whom Wormold tries to recruit initially. Paul Rogers plays Hubert Carter, Wormold's would-be assassin. This is one very funny film that lampoons the British secret service mercilessly. The satire continues to build right to the end with a surprise finish that caps the mockery beautifully. Again, most of the humor is in the scheming, plotting and situations rather than in the dialog. The script at the end, though, has a running pun that wraps it up nicely. After Wormold has been given the boot by the Cuban police, and is in London with Severn, Hawthorne says to C, "The loss of those two will create quite a vacuum." C, "What?" Hawthorne, I'm most frightfully sorry, sir. I really didn't intend to make a pun. I only thought, perhaps, that if we are to make a clean sweep …"The movie was filmed in Cuba and England. The Havana scenes are around Cathedral Square and the Havana Biltmore Yacht and Country Club. It's interesting to see photos around the square after the Cuban Revolution (1953-1959). Cam shots today show very little human traffic and activity, and deterioration of the buildings. The movie prologue quickly points out that the story takes place and the movie was made there in the days "before the recent revolution." The movie came out in 1959, just after the end of the revolution that installed Fidel Castro at the head of a communist government. Thus, the Cuban filming would have been shot before July 1953. So, besides its wonderful satire of British espionage and government offices, "Our Man in Havana" gives some snapshots of life and street scenes in the once vibrant capital of Cuba. At one point, Wormold says to Carter, "Everything is legal in Cuba." Indeed, besides its high society and cultural side, the Havana of the mid- 20th century was known as a place where morals were subdued in favor of pleasure. This is a very clever satire, even though it's on the dark side in places. It's one of the best adult films (because of its content) that spoof government "intelligence" operations. It makes a fine addition to any film library.

To me Our Man In Havana was a strange film. It would have been far better had it been played more broadly and for satire. The potential was there, the cast actually a perfect one for it. But instead the film was played seriously.What an incredible premise. MI6 always on the lookout for agents and they can be recruited in a variety of ways spots expatriate vacuum cleaner salesman Alec Guinness living in Havana with his daughter Jo Morrow is scraping by on his job and it's expensive sending Morrow to a Catholic Convent school.Along comes Noel Coward from British Intelligence with a proposition some extra income to work for them and recruit other agents and send back reports on loose information he picks up. And he has to recruit other agents to report to him with them getting a stipend from MI6. It takes his good friend Burl Ives to show him the possibilities there. Ives is a German expatriate living in Havana as a doctor since the 30s. Invent stories, make up agents, pocket their stipends this could be a real money maker.I'm sure you can see the possibilities there for broad comedy. Yet though some laughs are here, it gets deadly serious when the other side expresses an interest in killing Guinness because his reports to British Intelligence are giving the reputation to Our Man In Havana as one of the best they have.One thing the British take pride in is their spy service. Since the days of Francis Walsingham who developed it for Queen Elizabeth I this something they take seriously. So of course when Guinness is finally found out to be a fake, they've got quite the conundrum.Also in the cast are Maureen O'Hara who said that she and Guinness got along well during the shoot in Cuba which was right after the Revolution of 1959. She even met Che Guevara there and was impressed by him. She and Guinness both devout Catholics always attended mass together.Ernie Kovacs plays a lecherous Cuban police captain who has his eyes on Jo Morrow. He's not sure what Guinness is about but he knows he's up to something. For the price of Morrow he'll cover for Guinness. O'Hara said that the new Cuban government watched the shooting of this film with intense scrutiny and wanted it made clear that Kovacs was a Batista supporter. Kovacs was the kind who would have been shot right off when Castro took power.Although Our Man In Havana is well done it misses being a classic. What Mel Brooks could have done with this plot though.

Comedy and espionage make uneasy bedfellows in this Alec Guinness vehicle. Viewers should expect more of a morality play than a gleeful farce.Guinness frequently played characters leading double lives. Here we see his character Wormold tripped up by one that may cost him his life. Wormold is a vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana who is approached by a fellow named Hawthorne (Noel Coward), alias Agent 59200, who wants Wormold to serve the British Secret Service "for $150 a month and expenses" as his subagent, 59200/5, collecting secret information regarding pre-Castro Cuba.Encouragement for this comes not only indirectly from his love for his spendthrift daughter Milly (Jo Morrow) but more directly from his best friend, a castoff German doctor named Hasselbacker (Burl Ives), whose advice forms the heart of the message from screenwriter Graham Greene, adapting his own novel:"That sort of information is always easy to give. If it is secret enough, you alone know it. All you need is a little imagination...As long as you invent, you do no harm. And they don't deserve the truth."The joke, which is also the story's tragedy, is Wormold invents too well, convincing not only his London paymasters but the opposition of his fiction's veracity. Director Carol Reed famously made a spy film, "The Third Man," which blended tragedy and comedy in equal measure. This time, the comedy is more front-and-center, but efforts at creating a light tone conflict with the more serious message and various characters' fates. "Our Man In Havana" struggles at times with what kind of film it wants to be.Perhaps Guinness's own difficulty with his part contributes to this confusion. He reportedly found Reed's instruction ("Don't act!") unhelpful. Ives is especially heavy for the film's most delicate part, making it oppressively sad; I wish that Reed's collaborator Orson Welles could have taken this part and invested it with some of his trademark cunning and craft.Much of "Our Man In Havana" does work, and well. Oswald Morris's cinematography employs actual Havana locations to great effect, using unusually angled shots of the crumbling, sun-drenched city. You feel the tension of Wormold's world in every scene. Ernie Kovacs, a hero of early TV comedy, gets a lot out of a thanklessly straight part, the menacing but sensitive Segura, who lusts for Milly and explains his position with real sensitivity even though he never loses the cruelty of the character."Do you play checkers, Mr. Wormold?" he asks."Not very well," answers Wormold."In checkers, one must move more carefully than you have tonight."Wormold isn't kidding; he only knows enough to lose. In a world this topsy-turvy, it proves the right approach.Coward does much to serve the comedy, which would be almost entirely absent without him. His recruitment of Wormold, which is played like a seedy homosexual liaison in bars and men's rooms, is a riot when one knows not only Coward's own legendary proclivities but his friendship with that master of spy fiction, Ian Fleming. Some of the film is even set in Fleming's own Jamaican stomping grounds; one can imagine the creator of James Bond must have enjoyed this send-up of his work before it was a gleam in Albert Broccoli's eye."Our Man In Havana" plays with your mind and conscience for an hour and a half. It capably establishes a dark mood with cheerful undertones though it would have worked better vice versa, which was my takeaway from reading the novel. Anyway, it's intelligent, entertaining, and worth a look.

Carol Reed directed some matchless films, "The Third Man" among them. He was capable of clunkers too, like "The Public Eye." This one is somewhere in between but probably closer to "The Third Man." At any rate, it's light years ahead of most of the junk showing up on screens today, though they cost a million times more.Alec Guiness, in a performance both effective and casual, runs a vacuum cleaner shop in Bautista's Havana. He's not doing that well. The palmetto bugs object to the noise. His daughter, Jo Morrow, though is now a budding seventeen-year-old in a convent school and has expensive tastes. And Guiness wants to send her to school in Switzerland, an expensive proposition. In other words, Guiness finds himself in a dilemma common to us non-millionaires, in a vice whose heads consist of expenses and income.But his life changes. He's contacted by the prim, cautious Noel Coward who wants to hire him as a spy for the British Secret Service. Guiness sensibly pooh-poohs the proposition until Coward mentions the salary, at which Guiness gulps and nervously accepts.Coward explains the deal. Guiness will receive his tax-free salary and just "keep an eye on things", sending regular reports to London. He will also have to hire his own agents, who will also receive salaries through Guiness, and who will submit regular reports.A dream come true for the impecunious vacuum shop proprietor. Giddy with delight, he begins making up the names of agents, picking them from phone books and dance hall placards. Pressed for specific information, he draws a picture of one of his vacuum cleaners, claims it is based on the report of one of his agents, that it is a huge installation in the mountains, and sends that in.Regrettably, London takes the report seriously, although Coward remarks tentatively that it looks a little as if it's made up of vacuum cleaner parts. The Chief, Ralph Richardson, admits that it does, but why not build a giant vacuum cleaner as a weapon? The revelation is important enough for London to send an experienced agent and cryptographer, along with staff and equipment, to Havana, where all lodge in Guiness's cramped quarters. His chief assistant is Maureen O'Hara.Somewhere around the point of no return, the story turns rather serious. The Havana constabulary get wind of the operation. And there is "another side" that tries to assassinate Guiness. A couple of deaths, one of them tragic, precede the ironically happy ending.It's usually billed as a comedy and I guess it is, but don't expect to laugh out loud at any of the dialog or scenes. They're smile worthy but low key. A good deal of the humor depends on Guiness's performance and he delivers. But, again, the pace is never frantic. I'll give two examples.When Coward recruits Guiness, he takes him into the men's room of one of the local bars, where he checks for hidden microphones, turns on the taps, and makes Guiness hide in one of the stalls so that, should anyone enter, Coward and Guiness won't be seen together. That's pretty ridiculous in itself, but it gets worse when Guiness tries by himself to recruit an engineer as one of his agents. He approaches the astonished man in the men's room and tries to coax him into one of the stalls while explaining that he'll tell the engineer what to do later. The engineer mistakes Guiness's intentions.The preceding paragraph was a single example of the humor, though it may look like two. Here comes the second example. It's short. Ready? After the story takes a serious turn, Coward invites Guiness to lunch al fresco and tells him matter-of-factly that persons unknown are out to kill him by poisoning him. Guiness is in the middle of slurping a Planter's Punch and does a semi-spit take. Carol Reed frames the shot of Guiness so that he's almost hidden by a bankful of lillies in full bloom. (Kids: Lillies? Funerals?)Oh, well. Let me add that just before this exchange, in a practiced gesture at keeping their conversation hidden, Coward gets up and closes the door between the bar and the tables outside, but the door, like the wall, is nothing more than a few poles of bamboo criss-crossing wide open space.Whether or not it was intended as a comment on Noel Coward's own proclivities, everywhere he goes, dressed like a British gentleman, he's accompanied by an enthusiastic band of mostly young musicians playing guitars and singing, "Donde Va?" Maureen O'Hara is remarkable. She looks magnificent, for one thing. And this is twenty-two years after her film debut. And it's her finest performance, one of the few in which she's cast as something other than a caricature. What a woman.The movie's well worth seeing, keeping in mind that this is not an Ealing comedy or some kind of farce.