Ian Fleming on the film Our Man in Havana
(The Third Programme, BBC, Jan. 7, 1959)
It is very sad that they are even knocking the Secret Service these days. Sad, I mean, for those who have thrilled since their childhood to the glorious myth and sad for all the world of writers and actors whose livelihood depends on the Great Stone Face, perhaps with a black patch over one eye, that can be written about and acted but for security’s sake never properly described.
Already most of the Secret Service cliches have died. In the old days it was apparently possible to get hold of a beautiful girl with a basic training in architecture and ballistics and get her into bed with the enemy general who, between transports, would give her full details of the fortress that was the strong point in his country’s defence. And there was that great prize of the code book purloined by the embassy valet, and the people in mackintoshes followed by other people in mackintoshes, the conversations among the potted palms and champagne buckets overheard by mustachioed waiters, and the assassinations—right down to William Le Queux’s explosive cigar between the lips of the English Foreign Secretary—all these splendid situations are so rusty that no amount of oil can cure the squeaks and rattles of steam-age spy-manship.
Nowadays, and for so long as war is a threat, the spy is a ticking seismograph on top of the Jungfrau measuring distant atomic explosions on the other side of the world, or instruments carried in aircraft that measure the uranium or plutonium content of the atmosphere, and these things have about as much romance as a dentist’s drill.
Except in very small contexts, the number of tanks, the number of soldiers, the design even of a hydrogen bomb, are hardly worth the powder of a Secret Service. The big people have all the big weapons and the small people have them not. Details of the weapons are unimportant. They are known. They’ll destroy the world. There is only one thing to know, a sure thing, and that knowledge itself is only vital for perhaps a quarter of an hour during which preventive or retaliatory measures can be mounted—where, exactly when, to a millionth of a second, is whose finger going to press a button?
These things being so, and they are so, any book or play or film about the Secret Service must be either incredible or farcical. Personally, I am sufficiently in love with the myth to write basically incredible stories and to keep, without any difficulty for I am in love with the myth, a straight face. Graham Greene in his book had a more ruthless approach and a modern one. He took the splendid Secret Service myth of centuries and kicked it hilariously downstairs.
Briefly, Our Man in Havana is a vacuum cleaner salesman called Wormold (a typical “reluctant hero” name) eking out a living in Havana in company with his daughter, in the book an adorable nymphet, on whom, since his wife left him, Wormold lavishes his love and his spare money. Alec Guinness is totally Wormold, as he is totally all his acting parts, but Miss Jo Morrow as his daughter, endowed with only half the appropriate co-efficient of nymphetry, seems more like a mistress.
Wormold, because of the cash that will help to push his daughter on in Havana Society, is half-willingly impressed into the Secret Service by Noel Coward, who plays the pin-stripe “Steady on, old man” Secret Service agent to hilarious perfection.
Alec Guiness soon finds that he can get by in the Secret Service with a lot of half-baked mumbo-jumbo. He uses names drawn at random from the membership list of the local country club and reinforces them with drawings on secret weapons copied from his vacuum cleaner catalogue.
This splendid situation, that is almost too close to the truth for those who served in wartime intelligence to find funny, should proceed horribly from farce to real terror but somehow it doesn’t quite come through. The photography is magnificent—the sleazy and acutely observed Cuban scene [is] dotted with harsh-looking Cuban police and dominated by the vast personality of Burl Ives. (The trouble with Ives is that he always has the ability to act anyone else off the screen. Here he plays the agent of an unspecified power as Emil Jannings would have played him.)
Miss Maureen O’Hara, the Secret Service agent sent out from London headquarters to help Wormold—does Wormold marry her in the end? I couldn’t make [it] out—is as desriable as I would wish her to be, and Mr. Ernie Kovacs as the Chief of Police has all the villainy of understatement and, because he has been solidly cast, holds the narrative sequence more or less together. There is of course not enough of Sir Ralph Richardson, the Chief of the Secret Service and head of the tragical farce that Graham Greene has made of our favourite myth.
For the rest, it need only be said that if the Secret Service had to be kicked downstairs, Graham Greene, Alec Guinness, Noel Coward and Sir Ralph Richardson should have been able to do it. In fact this film, which is somehow made extraordinarily incomprehensible, is largely carried, despite the great names, by Mr. Ernie Kovacs, Mr. Burl Ives, and Miss Maureen O’Hara, in that order.
I’m afraid I don’t understand Sir Carol Reed. He directs individual scenes brilliantly but so often it seems to me he loses narrative sequences. In short this to me was a brilliant book that has somehow lost its point, and it was a very good one, as a film.
Note: A year earlier Fleming had reviewed the novel Our Man in Havana.