Our Man in Havana (1959) (Twilight Time, Blu-ray) is the third and final collaboration between director Carol Reed and writer Graham Greene. In some ways it plays like a sardonic post-script to their great success, The Third Man, in others a transition film between the gritty but heroic espionage thrillers of the forties and fifties and the far more ambivalent and skeptical work of John Le Carre, as seen in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold just a few years later. (Le Carre’s The Tailor of Panama spins an updated version of the same basic story of Havana.) The big difference is tone: Our Man in Havana is a lampoon of international espionage games and the gullible officers running Britain’s MI6 like an old boy’s club. Everyone on their honor and all that.
Alec Guinness is Jim Wormold, the meek British everyman in Batista’s Cuba and a single father trying to keep his pretty, spoiled teenage daughter (Jo Morrow) safe from the wolves prowling the streets of Havana. Reluctantly drafted by a British Secret Service agent (perfectly droll Noel Coward), he finds he’s a lousy agent but a terrific author and, failing any legitimate intelligence, he spins a doozy of a secret agent yarn, complete with a cast of supporting agents (all in need of generous expense accounts) and a secret installation worthy of a James Bond villain. It’s a veritable cash cow but it also brings unwanted attention from the head of British Intelligence (a dryly officious Ralph Richardson) who sense him a staff to expand his operations (including neophyte secretary Maureen O’Hara). The satire of gullible intelligence officers and corrupt politicians (an oily, somewhat sinister Ernie Kovacs as the soft-spoken terror Capt. Segura) take a darker turn when the fantasies spun by Wormold take root in the spy community, leaving real victims in its wake. Our man in Havana a target of enemy agents and his apolitical best friend and drinking buddy, the world-weary German expatriate Dr. Hasselbacher (Burl Ives), gets caught in the middle of the intelligence turf war.
Tyrone Power was one of the top stars of 20th Century Fox, thanks to his turns as the glib, arrogant golden boy in the studio’s colorful musicals and melodramas and the earnest, driven young visionary or angry rebel of Lloyds of London (1936), Jesse James (1939), and Johnny Apollo (1940), where his dark good looks and brooding presence gave his handsome romantic lead a bit of smoldering intensity. In the 1940s, Fox decided to mold him into an Errol Flynn-style swashbuckling hero and found success in The Mark of Zorro (1940), as the Robin Hood of old California, and Blood and Sand (1941), as a bullfighting hero led astray by the temptations of fame and fortune. The Black Swan (1942) was the next logical step: a swashbuckling pirate rogue turned hero. It shouldn’t have been a good fit for Power, who was better at brooding and flashing his temper than flexing his physicality, but he brings a bit of both the flashy arrogant and the brooding hero to the role.
