Our Man in Havana (1959)

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Our Man in Havana dispatches its two major characters, the vacuum-cleaner salesman and a master spy, to the Caribbean, where the clash between Englishness and otherness (chiefly Hispanic, but also Germanic) leads to readjustments of the Englishman's attitudes towards self and other. Our Man in Havana takes advantage of a turning point in its history to pursue its explorations of identity in the changing conditions of Cuban society. Made only three years after the Suez Canal fiasco, the film is also a comic statement about Britain's decline as a world power, and satirises the wish fulfilment fantasies of spy narratives, like Ian Fleming's Casino Royale (1953), whose hero James Bond, was yet to be given a screen life by Sean Connery. Our Man in Havana responds to shrinking British influence abroad not with anger but ridicule, no longer confident after the loss of Empire and overseas political influence about what Jeffrey Richards and others have highlighted as one of the main characteristics of the pre-war national character, an unshakeable sense of superiority.

Extract from Carol Reed by Peter William Evans. Courtesy Manchester University Press.