Our Man in Havana 1959

Highly recommend this one…

Based of Graham Greene novel

Jim Wormold(Alec Guinness ‘Bridge on the river Kwai, Star Wars’) is an expatriate Englishman living in pre-revolutionary Havana with his teenage daughter Milly. He owns a vacuum cleaner shop but isn’t very successful so he accepts an offer from Hawthorne(Noel Coward .’The Italian job’ and the second coming of Oscar Wilde ) of the British Secret Service to recruit a network of agents in Cuba. Wormold hasn’t got a clue where to start but when his friend Dr. Hasselbacher(Burl Ives, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) suggests that the best secrets are known to no one, he decides to manufacture a list of agents and provides fictional tales for the benefit of his masters in London. He is soon seen as the best agent in the Western Hemisphere but it all begins to unravel when the local police decode his cables and start rounding up his “network” and he learns that he is the target of a group out to kill him Also starring Maureen O’Hara(The Quiet Man) as British intelligenceWritten in the wake of the popularity of the James Bond Novel Phenomena, and released three years before the franchise begin with ”Doctor No” Spys and the Cold war were a score of fear and speculation at the time, the Novel and the film more so make fun of this as well as present a possibility of real espionage and contract killing as the result of ‘Hype’ of the Red Scare , this film although a parody shows the real consequences of what happens when you dont check your facts and believing in ‘Santa clause’Although the New Government of Cuba was More than happy for Graeme Greens novel about the baptista regime, showing it to be corrupt and the thoughtless meddlings foreign spies from both Britain and America , The Book and the Film were subsequently withdrawn after Greens comments about the treatment of Intellectuals and Gays and Lesbians ,People don’t realize when they put posters of Che Guevara on their wall , they forget when he worked with Fidel Castro he actually supported putting intellectuals and Homosexuals in concentration camps, subsequently this important film about the change in power in Cuba from the Batista’s seems to be little know in its own country.
as a time capsule of a period in history its fascinating to watch a generation who lived in fear of the Bomb and the blunderings of both sides to resolves this the best way they can by sheer stupidity.
Alex Guinness is great as a British ‘Jimmy Stewart’ everyman who wants the best for his family and plays both side of politics like a poker game with deadly consequences.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054152/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1