Film Summary DXXVII (Our Man in Havana)

'Our Man in Havana' is one of those films where in the production history and the overall filming is more entertaining than the film itself.
Mainly because of the backdrop involving the Cuban Revolution. Which is not only happening before the movie was finished but was almost concluded towards the release date of the film.
Therefore when the movie comes out its entire backdrop is semi irrelevant. As all the old guard had gotten pushed out of Cuba at the time because of the Revolutionary forces.

I stumbled upon this movie when looking through Alec Guinness is filmography. for I am nothing if not a massive Alec Guinness fan. So I was looking for an excuse to watch one of his films. And I was kind of hoping for a more dramatic interpersonal story with Alec Guinness possibly playing a downtrodden worker having to deal with the chaos of the Cuban instability under Fulgencio Batista.

Instead we get this weird Espionage comedic Thriller. Where in a member of the British secret service is trying to hire a field agents to be his representative in Havana.
He stumbles upon Alec Guinness's character (Jim Wormold) who runs the vacuum store. He does everything in his power to try and convince Jim that Espionage is the way to go. From Nationalism to straight up high payment.
It's the latter of which that

It's the latter of which that appeals to Jim. He's sales of vacuums are becoming less and less financially viable and his daughter is 'high maintenance' to say the least.
Not only does he want to provide for his daughter, but he'd like to get out of Cuba before the Revolution hits its final conclusion. So he takes the agent up on his offer and becomes  a secret agent. The only problem is he has no idea what to do.

He's supposed to recruit more people to help him on the field, but he hasn't any clue who to go to and his methods of persuasion are less than adequate.
He starts to have something of a crisis as he realises that he's in over his head.

Luckily for him an acquaintance of his (who runs this weird laboratory that wants to study the blueness of cheese) gives him the idea to just lie about the information.
Make it all up and just ship out to London whatever you can find.
They can't prove otherwise back home and at the end of the day they just really want information as opposed to results.

So Jim does just that.
He makes up his own assistants*, he makes up information to send back to London, he even draws out a secret base in the middle of Cuba using a vacuum as inspiration.
Everything is going swimmingly until one of the agents comes to him claiming ''we need to get more viable information on this secret project in the middle of the Cuban mountains.''

Now he's back to square one as the agency is sending him actual agents to oversee his operations.
So the story becomes this big facade of keeping up appearances and tiptoeing around the real issue as he makes up stories and even fabricates deaths of some of his agents. So that certain information can't be discovered.
But this has a doubling affect as the Cuban Police are starting to acquire interest in the man as well. They also believe the fake information and want to figure out what exactly it is he knows and which people have their hands in the Cuban pot of interests.
So now he's trying to play a game of cat-and-mouse. Only there is no mouse and the cat is just chasing its own tail trying to convince itself that what it's chasing a mouse.

At some point everything starts to blow up in his face. Jim has to face the realities that if he doesn't reveal the fake information to his own side he'll probably be killed (if not by the Cubans, then by the British secret service itself or possibly buy some radical third alignment of people who want to get in on the action.)
One of these people may have even been his former friend** who would told him to just make up information as he was part of some secret cabal that was interlinked with a different secret organisation that may or may not have been associated with the former German powers in Europe. There's a whole thing here that the movie only scrapes that.

The kicker to all of this is once he's deported out of Cuba by one of the police commanders who (ironically fancies Jim's daughter) is that he has to return to London or he informs the Secret Service of all his former information only to be told to keep the information to himself because the secret service has made themselves so embarrassed by the situation.
That they're just going to pretend the whole thing was real to keep their heads above water. They even give Jim an honorary medal and a class where he has to teach Espionage to other people. That's proving that sometimes fictional information is better than incorrect information.

Overall it's a surprisingly comedic and fun movie. It wasn't what I was expecting it to be and I'm not sure I'd want to watch it again.
Alec Guinness does a pretty good job and all the side characters help to make you believe the story I just found myself semi just interested in this comedic approach to espionage.
It does definitely reflect the age in which it lives though.
Besides the uncertainty of Cuba it also shows the British incompetence as they maintain the facade of being the old world power that used to run everything and is now slowly but surely becoming less and less relevant today Cold War fuelled world.
A kind of wake up and smell the coffee moment.

In a way this film has become something of a time capsule. Now being a small representation of what exactly Cuba was before the Revolution. Bright, vibrant, full of Tourism and simultaneously corrupted and manipulated by other world powers.

*All of those field agents that Jim is creating also require their own payment plan but since there are no agents all the money goes directly back to Jim therefore he's making about six times the amount of money he should have properly had from the beginning. Which is a big reason that he tries to maintain the lie so long the payments is just too good. However a lot of that does go out the window once this random officer tries to poison him with whiskey and it leads to the death of a dog at this massive fires conference in Havana between American and British entrepreneurs.

**In fairness it was less of his friend more of an organisation that his friend had connections to. If anything it's this random guy who dresses like a Prussian officer who helps to keep Jim alive from the start. And unfortunately pays the price for it in the long run.