Watch Our Man in Havana For Free

Wow! Such a good movie.

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

the audience applauded

For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

Jim Wormold (Alec Guinness) is an expatriate Englishman living in pre-revolutionary Havana with his teenage daughter Milly (Jo Morrow). He runs a small vacuum cleaner shop while Milly is busy shopping. The latest being a horse. So he takes a job from British secret agent Hawthorne (Noel Coward) to recruit people for his spy network. He is hopeless in the effort. So his friend Dr. Hasselbacher (Burl Ives) suggests inventing everything. He even delivers a drawing of secret machinery based on a vacuum cleaner.This takes quite a few fun pointed jabs at the spy world. Hawthorne is conspicuously English. He is possibly the worst spy. This is the perfect antidote for a James Bond thriller. Alec Guinness is brilliant playing this seriously letting all the jokes come naturally. All the while, there is a threat of danger that is all too real.

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.

"Our Man in Havana" has all of the elements of a sure-fire classic: a cast that includes Alec Guinness, Burl Ives, Noel Coward, a very lovely Maureen O'Hara and Ralph Richardson; a screenplay by Graham Greene adapted from his own novel; and direction by Carol Reed, who had tackled Greene before and made one of the best films in history ("The Third Man").So why doesn't "Our Man in Havana" entirely work? I'm not sure, but I found myself wanting to like this movie far more than I actually did. Guinness plays a vacuum cleaner salesman living in Havana who gets recruited by the British secret service to do spy work for them. He doesn't want to be a spy but wants the fat paychecks that come with it, so he feeds them fake information to avoid having to do any actual work. But when very real consequences arise from his false information, he suffers a moral crisis.And maybe that's where the movie stumbles. That moral crisis is never made explicit, and the movie gets sidetracked into a revenge storyline as Guinness plans the murder of another agent out to get him. The film isn't as playful as the book, so it's not very funny when it should be, but since it doesn't examine the more serious themes inherent in the story as thoroughly as it could, there's nothing to fill the gap where the humor used to be.This film isn't exactly a misfire, but it's certainly no "Third Man."Grade: B

From the first shot, of Noel Coward in a dark suit and hat, tightly rolled umbrella, and immobile face striding down a Havana street besieged by grinning musicians and beggars, we know what we're in for: a story of chilly British imperturbability undermined by Latin misrule. The usual way this happens is through love or lust, but this movie has a subtler and darker theme--an amusing fantasy, in a dictatorship, turns into something seriously and horribly real.Attracted by the money that secret-service work will bring, but clueless as to how to do it, Wormold (Alec Guinness), a vacuum-cleaner salesman, makes up reports inspired by comic strips. But not only does London take them seriously--so does the other side, which has cracked his code.Our Man in Havana starts out as a comedy, but the humour turns to satire and then to a very black comedy indeed. Wormold's spy stories result in misunderstanding, then embarrassment, then murder, until he is put in a position where, though it's the last thing he wants, he has to become a hero, perhaps a dead one.An irony that went unappreciated at the time was of Alec Guinness expressing his disgust of homosexuals in one scene and, in another, being comically mistaken for one (in a maneuver shown him by Noel Coward!).Not many big laughs, but lots and lots of knowing and rueful smiles are what this movie inspires--it's a very dry martini in a world of brightly coloured alcopops.