General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Our Man in Havana

Our Man in Havana is a 1959 British comic spy film directed by Carol Reed, written by Graham Greene from his own 1958 novel, and starring Alec Guinness as a Havana vacuum cleaner salesman recruited by the British Secret Service.¹ It was the third and final film collaboration between Reed and Greene, after The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949).²

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer	Carol Reed; screenplay by Graham Greene from his 1958 novel¹
Lead cast	Alec Guinness (Jim Wormold), Burl Ives (Dr. Hasselbacher), Maureen O'Hara (Beatrice Severn), Ernie Kovacs (Capt. Segura), Noël Coward (Hawthorne), Ralph Richardson, Jo Morrow¹^•³
Production	Kingsmead Productions, Ltd., organized by Reed, with financial backing from Columbia Pictures¹^•⁴
Shooting	Location work in Havana, Cuba, 13 April–13 May 1959; interiors 18 May–7 August 1959 at Shepperton Studios, London¹
Release	World premiere in London 30 December 1959; New York opening 27 January 1960; US release March 1960¹
Format	Black and white, CinemaScope, Westrex sound; running time listed as 107 or 111 minutes¹
Setting	Pre-revolutionary Cuba, announced by the on-screen prologue "This film is set in Cuba before the recent revolution"¹

Spoilers

Plot

Jim Wormold is an expatriate Englishman in pre-revolutionary Havana who runs an unsuccessful vacuum cleaner shop and lives with his teenage daughter Milly.³ Hawthorne of the British Secret Service recruits him as the service's man in Havana and asks him to recruit a network of agents in Cuba.³ To collect pay without doing the work, Wormold invents agents and fabricates reports about foreign government secrets, sending London enlarged drawings of vacuum cleaner components presented as blueprints of a new and deadly weapon.⁵^•⁶ When Cuban authorities decode his fake messages, the deception turns dangerous, and Wormold must become the spy he dreads in order to survive his own swindle.⁶ In the end, rather than admit they were taken in by his invented sketches, the Secret Service offers Wormold a job in London and recommends an OBE.²

Origins of the story

Greene based the story on his own wartime espionage experience. While serving in Portugal near the end of World War II, he met German spies who sent invented reports back to their dying fatherland to keep collecting their pay.⁴ His first version was a one-page outline written for the Anglo-Brazilian director Alberto Cavalcanti, about an English agent in Estonia during the war who sold his government false information.⁴^•⁷ The British Board of Film Censors refused a certificate because the story would make fun of the Secret Service, and the project was abandoned.¹ Fifteen years later Greene wrote the novel, moving the setting to Cuba and changing the wife into a daughter; he explained that "a reader would not be sympathetic to a man cheating his country in Hitler's day."¹^•⁴

The novel was published on 6 October 1958, and seven days later Greene arrived in Havana with Reed to arrange the filming.² Alfred Hitchcock negotiated for the screen rights but would not meet Greene's asking price of 50,000 pounds; Greene sold them to Reed for much less, reasoning that a friend would remain faithful to the novel.¹^•⁴ Reed and Greene spent the best part of three months together on the script, working in Brighton.²^•⁴

Production in revolutionary Havana

The decision to film in Havana was made in December 1958, under Batista's government, and the new revolutionary government confirmed the arrangement after taking power on 1 January 1959.¹^•² Columbia's executives were concerned about sending a crew into the unstable country, but Greene assured them that his friendship with Castro would guarantee their safety.⁴ The regime change still had consequences: the script had to be submitted to the Minister of the Interior, which suggested thirty-nine changes, and the filmmakers added the written prologue stating that the story was set before the revolution to avoid criticism about presenting the current regime as corrupt.¹

The film used a Cuban subdirector, Cuban stand-by technicians, and many Cuban extras, and the Cuban labor union insisted that British production personnel be matched by Cuban stand-bys.²^•¹ According to a January 1959 news item, the character of Captain Segura was modeled on Captain Esteban Bentura, the head of Batista's police squad.¹

Casting

Columbia asked for American marquee names, so Reed cast the American stars Ernie Kovacs and the recent Oscar winner Burl Ives in supporting roles.⁴ Alec Guinness, a favorite in the United States from The Ladykillers (1955) and his Oscar-winning performance in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), starred as Wormold.⁴ Noël Coward, who had lost out on the role of Harry Lime in The Third Man a decade earlier, played the agent who recruits him.⁴ The studio wanted Lauren Bacall for the female lead, but she proved unavailable, so the part went to Maureen O'Hara, already under contract to Columbia; Jean Seberg declined the role of Milly in favor of Breathless (1960), and Jo Morrow was cast instead.⁴ Ralph Richardson, who had risen to international stardom in The Fallen Idol, played Coward's boss.⁴

Reception and legacy

Writing for Turner Classic Movies, Frank Miller calls the film's cast and witty Greene script a standout "well worth rediscovery and re-evaluation," while noting that because it was long unavailable on home video it remained one of Reed's least known films.⁴ The Albany film notes place it closer to the ambiguous, ethically complicated spy fiction of Greene, Eric Ambler, and John le Carré than to the screwball spy films of the early 1960s.⁷ The Harvard Film Archive describes Guinness's Wormold as played "with dry subtlety" and reads the film as commentary on a world Greene knew intimately.⁸

The story's afterlife extends into later spy fiction: John le Carré acknowledged that his novel The Tailor of Panama (1996) was modeled after Greene's Our Man in Havana.⁹ The film is now available on digital and DVD from Sony Pictures.⁶

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026