Director: Carol Reed

Cast: Alec Guinness, Burl Ives, Maureen O’ Hara, Noel Coward, Ralph Richardson

UK-USA 1959 | Black & white | 111 mins | Drama

Avaliable on: 35mm

Based on Graham Greene’s novel of the same name, Our Man in Havana is a wry black comedy set in pre-revolutionary Cuba. Alec Guinness is brilliant as Jim Wormold, a vacuum-cleaner salesman struggling to indulge the increasingly expensive tastes of his glamorous teenage daughter. Driven by economic necessity, he allows himself to be recruited as a Secret Service agent by ‘our man’ in the Caribbean (a delightfully witty cameo from Noel Coward). For lack of any real information, he concocts fake reports for his superiors, inventing a fictional world of assistants and counterspies. In the real world, however, Wormold’s seemingly harmless actions have alarming consequences …

The film’s wonderful Havana locations – captured in black and white 'Scope – are seen to ravishing effect in this new restoration by Sony-Columbia’s Grover Crisp.

More by Carol Reed