Director: Carol Reed
Writer: Graham Greene, from his novel of the same name
Stars: Alec Guinness, Burl Ives, Maureen O'Hara, Ernie Kovacs, Noël Coward and Ralph Richardson
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Index: 2019 Centennials.
As with House of Bamboo for Robert Stack, I couldn’t resist revisiting another fifties feature that I’ve previously covered for my next centennial review; this time, I’m remembering the pioneering American comedian, actor and writer, Ernie Kovacs, who was born a hundred years ago today in Trenton, NJ. While Kovacs only made a handful of films, just ten of them in the five year period before a car crash took his life in 1962, most would seem to be solid choices for this project. He competed against Jack Lemmon for the ladies in Operation Mad Ball and researched New York witches in Bell, Book and Candle. He tried to stymie Doris Day’s attempts to transport lobsters in It Happened to Jane and ran a backwater radar station in Japan in Wake Me When It’s Over. He worked to steal John Wayne’s gold mine in North to Alaska and played a memorable professional mourner in Five Golden Hours. However, none of those films had a fraction of the pedigree of this comedy, in which he played the polite but lethal Capt. Segura of the Cuban secret police.
Our Man in Havana began life in 1958 as a sardonic spy novel by the acclaimed British writer Graham Greene. It was the last of what he called his “entertainments”, which were popular thrillers as against “novels”, which were serious literary efforts, but it wasn’t entirely fictional. Greene had always been passionate about world travel, often visiting the sort of places that most didn’t: Mexico while it was being secularised; the leper colonies of the Congo Basin and the British Cameroons; and Haiti under the brutal rule of “Papa Doc” Duvalier. These travels led to his sister recruiting him into MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, in 1941, where his supervisor was Kim Philby, not yet revealed as a Soviet double agent. While working in counter-espionage, he learned about German agents in Portugal, such as “Garbo”, who created entirely fake reports in order to earn bonuses and generate expenses. He turned this into a film script, set in Estonia just before the Second World War, but it never reached production in that form.
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Later, though, having visited Cuba in 1957, where he helped Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries fight the regime of Fulgencio Batista by transporting warm clothing to rebels in the hills, he realised that the country would be the perfect setting for his Estonia script. It was the Cold War in miniature, after all. Castro was a Communist and Batista had been kept in office with substantial military and financial support from the United States. What’s more, it sat in the Gulf of Mexico close to the American coast. What better nation could there be to satirise the trusts and mistrusts of the espionage business by turning a vacuum cleaner salesman into a spy who realises that he can make up whatever threats he likes and his masters will buy it all, hook, line and sinker? And I mean buy in the literal sense. Hilariously, his fictitious reports include secret military weapons in the mountains, thus predating in fiction the very real Cuban Missile Crisis by four years. We know that life imitates art, but sometimes life imitates art imitating life.
Our Man in Havana was an immediate success and Columbia quickly snapped up the film rights, hiring Greene himself to adapt his own novel into a screenplay. After all, he’d already successfully translated his own work into Brighton Rock and The Fallen Idol, the latter of which had landed him an Oscar nomination, and he’d written The Third Man from scratch. Who could do better? Well, the quality didn’t stop with Greene. Columbia put Carol Reed into the director’s seat; he had directed The Fallen Idol and The Third Man, though he wouldn’t win his Oscar until 1968’s Oliver! And just look at the cast! Jim Wormold, the hapless vacuum cleaner salesman, is no less a name than Alec Guinness, in between The Scapegoat and Tunes of Glory and only two years after his Academy Award for The Bridge on the River Kwai. He’s recruited into MI6 by regional spy Ralph Richardson and his boss back in England is Noël Coward. His closest friend in Havana is Burl Ives and the secretary MI6 sends him is Maureen O’Hara. Talk about a cast!
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Richardson looks like a government minister, even when surrounded by a throng of local musicians, but he’s a spy, Hawthorne by name and “C” by code, and his bailiwick is the entire Caribbean. He’s on a recruiting drive for agents and that’s why he’s making his way to the vacuum cleaner shop run by Jim Wormold to chat with the clueless proprietor, not about the appropriately named latest model that he’s hawking, the Atomic Pile, but more leading subjects like Wormold’s passport and daughter, Milly, a devout Catholic school student with expensive tastes in horses and sixteen year old looks that attract wolf whistles galore. “C” starts accidentally on purpose bumping into Wormold in other places too and, sure enough, soon adds him to his roster as his man in Havana, the $150 a month plus expenses (tax free) being the kicker. After all, how else will Wormold be able to pay for a country club membership and a finishing school in Switzerland? It all sounds like a match made in Heaven. Well, not quite. There’s an important catch, you see.
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Here’s where Graham Greene demonstrates his mastery of comedy, because Wormold’s flights of fancy are just the setup. Now, “C”, testing his worst case scenario theory, sends his man in Havana a secretary and a radio operator. Now, Wormold has to back up his creations with actual evidence which, of course, doesn’t exist, all while Capt. Segura escalates his presence by becoming more than just an annoyance. He’s smitten with Milly, which ought to be creepy but instead just adds pressure on Wormold. While he’s trying to invent ways by which his imaginary agents can’t be reached, the Red Vulture starts picking up his daughter from the gates of her Catholic school and singing to her as he gives her a police escort home. You can imagine the opportunities here for polite screwball comedy, especially with Alec Guinness facing off against the ever-suspicious Ernie Kovacs. Greene uses his real world experience of spycraft to keep escalating the tension too, so that Guinness is challenged more and more just as Wormold is.
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This is unmistakably Alec Guinness’s show. Jim Wormold is a gift of a part for any actor, but especially one of Guinness’s calibre. It really is a joy watching him revel in his own perceived cleverness when his fabrications bear fruit and then squirm when the walls close on him. It’s hard to pick a favourite scene because there are so many setpieces. Early on, he waltzes into the country club like the cat that ate the cream, even though a waiter almost kicks him out because he’s not known. There’s a fascinating scene at Milly’s birthday party, when Capt. Segura joins their table uninvited and flirts with inappropriateness while Wormold flirts with a lady at the bar, who turns out to be the secretary Hawthorne has sent him. It’s one scene for everyone else but it’s two for Guinness, who has to bounce between them. There’s another where he has to give a speech at a businessman’s luncheon, knowing that someone is there with the sole intention of murdering him through poison. But who? How many? Surely it’s not his own fake agent?
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While most American television viewers today wouldn’t know him from Adam, Kovacs was a real pioneer, though it could well be that, even had he lived, he wouldn’t have been able to maintain the wild invention that he was known for. Lindsy E. Pack, writing for the Museum of Broadcast Communications wrote, “The Ernie Kovacs shows were products of the time when television was in its infancy and experimentation was acceptable. It is doubtful that Ernie Kovacs would find a place on television today. He was too zany, too unrestrained, too undisciplined.” It was precisely those attributes that made him such a pioneer. His 1950 show Three to Get Ready was the first regular breakfast show on a major network. He created visual effects by manipulating the cameras to seem to be underwater or on the ceiling or looking through his co-star’s head. He also moved off stage, even out of the studio, always on camera. Pulitzer Prize-winning critic William Henry III called him “television's first significant video artist.”
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And Kovacs does a fantastic job too, his character there at the very beginning before we ever see Alec Guinness, but growing all the way through, Capt. Segura’s connections to Wormold reminding of the characters played by Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains in Casablanca. That the script almost leads them to “the beginning of a beautiful friendship” validates Fidel Castro’s criticism that the novel did not adequately rail against the brutality of the Batista regime. Given that the film was made with his express permission, it would have been inappropriate for it to allow such an ending. Capt. Segura is not a nice man, but he’s not a stupid one and he’s a much better player of the game than either Wormold or his various superiors. We don’t like him, because we know that, if we were drinking buddies and we put a foot wrong, he’d kill us in a heartbeat, but he has charm. As Milly points out, “he tortures prisoners but he’s always been nice with me.” Ernie Kovacs died in 1962 at only 42, but he’s still with us on the screen. Happy birthday, sir!
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