Reviewed by: Hal Astell
Set in Cuba before 'the recent revolution', it would appear
from first glimpses that this just couldn't fail. Produced and directed by
Carol Reed, with a screenplay by Graham Greene that was adapted from his own
novel, and starring no less a Great British trio than Alec Guinness, Noel
Coward and Ralph Richardson. Also credited before the title are Burl Ives,
Ernie Kovacs and Maureen O'Hara, hardly minor names themselves. It's as great
as it ought to be, but I was seriously surprised at the content. I thought it
was a spy film, and it is, but it's also a comedy which I really wasn't
expecting.
Greene introduces us to the characters through humour.
Guinness is Jim Wormold, a mild mannered vacuum cleaner salesman and Coward is
Hawthorne, a spymaster who comes to visit him with strange questions and an
offer to meet him in the gents. What he's really doing is hiring him to work
for the British secret service as the title character, part of his Caribbean
network, and Wormold accepts so as to be able to finance his daughter Milly's
expensive equestrian dreams. Ives is a friend of Wormold's, some sort of German
doctor doing research into cheese or some such, and Kovacs is the Red Vulture,
a notorious Cuban official with an interest in everything and everybody, most
obviously Milly.
Guinness always had a joyously quiet talent for humour and
he's hilarious here coming out with great lines, knowing grins and subtly
hilarious changes of expression. His daughter Milly has him beat on the lines,
pointing out about the Red Vulture that 'he tortures prisoners but he's always
been nice with me', but the rest belongs to Guinness. Anyway, when trying to
recruit agents, he ends up back with his friend Dr Hasselbacher, played by
Ives, who points out that the best way to deal with secrets is to invent things.
Guinness subsequently invents a whole slew of agents and
runs up a hugely inventive web of intrigue that has nothing remotely to do with
reality. This works amazingly well, quickly turning him into the best agent in
the western hemisphere, but his works of fiction also garner attention from
Hawthorne, who sends him a secretary and a radio operator, which garners undue
attention, and the whole mess of fabrications starts to take on unfortunate
reality. Suddenly all the real people that he pretended were fake agents are in
very real danger indeed and Wormold himself is pressed by the Red Vulture,
Captain Segura into being a double agent.
I haven't read a lot of Graham Greene so I don't know how
this fits in with the rest of his work. It certainly isn't anything like I
expected, but my expectations weren't shot down in a bad way, I was merely
pleasantly surprised at my lack of the remotest clue of what the film was
about.
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