Kick-Back Friday: #69

The comedy and gravity of global espionage are explored in Our Man in Havana (1959), Carol Reed's adaption of the Graham Greene novel. A humble vacuum cleaner salesman in prerevolutionary Cuba, Jim Wormold (Alec Guinness) adds to his income by exploiting the pyramid structure of British intelligence. With its uneven tone, the movie's never quite what it could be; but Greene shows off a blithe cynicism in the story's fantasy-to-reality turnabout. With Burl Ives, Ernie Kovacs, and a-not-particularly-well-cast Maureen O'Hara.