***On Her Majesty’s Secret Service-Graham Greene’s Our Man In Havana

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Our Man In Havana, starring Alex Guinness, based on a screenplay and novel by Graham Green, 1959 

Yes Virginia, there was a Her Majesty’s Secret Service, a cinematic version anyway, before Sean Connery’s James Bond exploded onto the screen with his then high tech-aided acts of derring-do. Whether that old time secret service was worth its salt, was anything but a good old boys’ club for unemployed university graduates without first son gentry (you know second sons and later unable to grab a share of the encumbered property), noble (again second sons and later unable to be the Earl, Duke, Count, Marquis, etc. of Stumblebrook or whatever rotten borough they represented in the Lords), or royal (you know the second in line just waiting around hoping that number one falls down and has no kids before the fall)  status and without other means or gainful employment is an open question. Certainly for the time period of the film during the height of the Cold War frenzy that is an open to question in light of the ease with which Kim Philby and the Cambridge spies did what they assumed was heroic work on behalf of the Soviet Union. As a recent Philby biography has once again shown the secret service operations were an open sieve shop filled with all kinds of good old boy implicit trusts but that issue is a separate question for another day when I am reviewing the Philby biography.

Of course any governmental agency is entirely capable of bureaucratic inertia and pratfalls, with or without Cold War backdrops, otherwise unemployable wayward sons, and oddball placeholders, but Graham Greene in the film under review, Our Man in Havana, knew enough about the inner workings of the agency to have a field day poking fun at its follies, and at its sometimes bizarre ways of looking at the rational world.

This film has an added dated aspect to it since its time frame was just before the Castro Brothers-Che-July 26ht movement led Cuban Revolution that would change Havana, change Cuba from a free-wielding anything goes American sin city outpost to a thorn in the side of Western capitalists. A thorn that played (and plays today against all reason) a key part in keeping things in an uproar in the American lake, the Caribbean, and elsewhere during the Cold War. That said one of the imperatives of the Cold War for both sides was to have “boots on the ground,” or maybe better shoes on that ground, in any locations that might be of interest as listening posts for what the locals were, or were not, doing. Normal spy stuff that has been going on since the first powerful guy who was curious about his neighbor’s intentions sent out a sacrificial lamb to scout the works.

And that is where run-of- the-mill British exile and vacuum cleaner salesman James, understatedly played by Alex Guinness, comes in to foul up the works, fouls up the best laid plans, for his own simple purposes. Purposes which non-professional spies, taking advantage of the paranoid “spook” mentality, have been doing since, well, whenever they started spy services. That is to get some serious dough to keep his doted upon young daughter in some kind of style, and away from the riffraff.       

So despite all appearances to the contrary Hawthorne, a decidedly good old boy network station chief for the Caribbean played by Noel Coward recruits James, and tells him about his expected tasks. Tasks that James is incapable of performing since he is not spy material. But get this, maybe he is. In order to keep the money rolling in James, in     lieu of any real intelligence provided or local agents recruited figured out that he could make stuff up and nobody would be the wiser. Hell, it done all the time to make busy work in that trade. Just look at the bungles of the real life CIA over the half century or so (and of course that Philby-tricked British equivalent mentioned earlier).

And so the comedy of errors commenced and James’ creativity had given him all the financial rewards he desired. But then, as things must in such a comedy of errors, the other shoe fell. The other shoe being that no one, not James, not Hawthorne, not the nefarious Cuban secret police captain, played by Ernie Novacs, who was also sweet on James’ young daughter, can pull the thing together before the service finds out that James is a fraud. A fraud who moreover as such things go winds up getting people killed before he is brought to ground. But here is the real beauty of this film. Once everything has been exposed, at least within the agency, the cover your ass high sign was on. So James instead of facing hard time in some dank Coldwater prison never to be heard or seen again was essentially pensioned off and the agency swept the whole thing under the rug, locked the door, and never looked back. Sound familiar about the doings of a certain American spy agency. Ask Kim Philby.