1958 was the year when the unrest in Cuba reached a peak. The rebellious guerrilla movement, spearheaded by Fidel Castro and his cohorts Raul Castro and the legendary Che Guavara, had commenced a full-frontal onslaught on Batista's military government. In response, the tyrannical president egged his ruthless police force to bend and even break more rules and the result was an unrelenting sense of paranoia and dread among the Cuban populace as they were silenced brutally with random arrests, interrogation, torture and even executions.
All of this would have meant that a thriller written by none other than Graham Greene, an author famed for razor-sharp reportage that enhanced the potency of his flawless sense of suspense and characterisation, would have been a sobering, brooding affair (something like what his later novel The Comedians, set in Papa Doc's hellish Haiti, would be). But Greene being Greene, the rascally clever and compulsive storyteller, gave the simmering backdrop a darkly comic twist and instead churned out a bitingly funny satire on the doddering incompetency of the British Intelligence Service, portrayed here as foolhardy enough to try and impress their American colleagues by hook or by crook, that had itself little to do with what was happening in Cuba at that crucial moment in history.
Or perhaps, it did have a lot to do with what was happening all over the world and not just in Cuba; perhaps, it was Greene's typically uncanny political prescience and poetic profundity that lifted Our Man In Havana from its original mould of a relatively light-hearted comic caper into a sardonic and sharply written novel that still resonates as a pacifist plea against war and hostility, even as times have changed.
Given just how much of the legendary author's oeuvre has been material ripe for cinematic adaptation, it is mildly surprising that it was only Sir Carol Reed, one of the most distinguished English filmmakers of all time, who could adapt Greene's carefully constructed suspense and intrigue, his spontaneity at clever repartee and the moral greyness that his characters, even the supposedly well-intentioned ones, exuded, to absolute perfection. It is less of a wonder that the writer, on his part, trusted few apart from Reed to film his work; it talks volumes of a level of mutual trust and clear-eyed understanding that is evidenced in how good the director's cinematic versions of his tales have turned out to be. Before they collaborated on Our Man In Havana, the two had worked together on the indisputable noir masterpiece The Third Man and the equally seminal whodunnit and morality play The Fallen Idol.
Does Our Man In Havana, that charmingly nutty caper which pokes gleeful fun at the stiff upper-lipped pretensions of the British intelligence community in the 1950s and 1960s, match up to Greene's more subtly acerbic satire on themes of consumerism, ideological allegiances and even love and patriotism? Indeed it does, like any good adaptation, though not in the ways that one would expect.
To begin with, Reed's film is a more light-hearted affair than the source novel. When adapting the book to the film, the author and the director choose a lighter, more casual vein, even heightening the comic element of the story to elicit more mirth. A couple of pivotal scenes from the novel, including one in which Wormold experiences, through his own less-than-pleasant experience with the brutal and domineering police of Cuba, his moment of epiphany that propels him to cook up his own fictional espionage yarn for his spymasters in London, are missing from the film. In the latter, Wormold is motivated solely by the handsome financial rewards promised which would, consequently, help him pay for the lavish gifts and the equally promising future he wishes for his daughter Milly.
But Greene's screenplay nevertheless still establishes Wormold as the eternal sufferer, for whom the new venture, of almost delusional grandeur, offers a new lease of life and hope. He is as utterly believable and even worth rooting for as the author made him out to be. One of the many sinful joys of reading Our Man In Havana is that, unlike most of Greene's believably flawed anti-heroes who are doomed to suffer for their inherent failings, Wormold is more or less a warped-up hero; what he does and the lies that he invents serve a particularly resonant and innocent concern: that of his daughter.
In the film, Reed and Greene paint him with the same strokes; he even comes across as more devilishly clever and quick-witted in the film, in the tradition of the archetype cinematic spy. As the film culminates faithfully in a climax of moral compromise, we see Wormold here as less of a hesitant, mild-mannered simpleton thrust into action and more of a wronged hero who resolves to do the right thing.
Equally then, one of the other pleasures of reading much of the book is the sparkling, snappy interplay between Wormold and Milly, between his world-weary predicament at her Catholic fads and her gushing effervescence. It reads like a verbal foreplay between the cautious English world of the father and the freewheeling, even frivolous atmosphere of Havana's sun-drenched sensuality. On one hand, he is exasperated increasingly over her relentless indulgence which is draining him financially; on the other, he cannot help but be besotted with her vivacious sense of mischief, which he deems as a respite from his own mundane, weather-beaten existence. The film captures that frothy repartee faithfully, though to a lesser extent, because, once again, we see Wormold here concerned about his daughter only initially and then becoming more self-assured in his trickery with the ease of a confidence trickster.
For the rest of the film, Greene's uncanny ear for both wry humour and emotional pathos marks the film's with its unmistakable stamp of poignancy and wit enlivening the dialogue. The conversations between Wormold and the other characters in the narrative are as dazzlingly clever and resonant as they are in the novel, even made more thoughtful and tongue-in-cheek by new scenes that the writer devises. It also helps that Reed assembles a superb ensemble to anchor the terrific Ealing legend Sir Alec Guinness at the helm of things. Mild-mannered yet assuredly affable, slippery yet suave, hilariously befuddled yet humane, Guinness' fascinating performance embodies all the facets that Greene lends to this hapless but heartfelt character. The tale's two smashing ladies, the bubbly Milly and the bravely committed Beatrice, are played with relish by the charming and vivacious Jo Morrow and Maureen O' Hara. Both are irresistibly alluring creations in flesh and blood and further evidence of the writer's underrated abilities at creating compelling females in his stories.
However, in both the film and the novel, the real broken heart is to be found in Dr. Hasselbacher, the real trademark Greene sufferer and sinner of this story. Helplessly optimistic even as the milieu of the city is darkening every minute, Hasselbacher is, like Wormold, very much an outcaste in the new era of American consumerism and the Atomic Age but he tries to make the most of it by staying blissfully ignorant of harsh reality, until it comes knocking on its door with devastating effect. In the film, Reed and Greene further shred away Hasselbacher of his goofy, garbled charm as in the novel. This also explains why one of the comic high-points of the book, wherein a palpably bamboozled Hasselbacher goes gleefully berserk with the anticipated glee of winning a lottery ticket, even bantering with an irate American tourist, is omitted and Burl Ives is convincingly weary and exasperated as Hasselbacher, lending the film with a much-needed surge of pathos.
There are digs to England's transatlantic cousins, from Greene lampooning American banks to be tediously slow and superficially affable to a neutral stance on the Cold War that Wormold holds, which also includes a distaste for nuclear technology. In the film, much of Greene's scathing criticism of American adventurism, as in his brilliant novel The Quiet American, is to be found in the most unexpected corners. In the book, Wormold feels like an outsider to his daughter because of a difference of faith; in the film, he sighs more at how 'they have given her an American accent'.
The writer's wary opinion of America is balanced adequately by his own sharply aimed jab at the pompous self-importance and naiveté of British intelligence. In the book, the non-plussed Hawthorne, who first initiates Wormold into the ranks, comes off as someone who 'carried with him the breath of beaches and the leathery smell of a good club', clearly a fading relic of colonial Jamaica, where he is posted. In Reed's adaptation, Hawthorne is played by the grand old Sir Noel Coward, whose portrayal is even more affecting in its quaintness; the first time we see him is when he is dressed more like a crusty old Londoner than in the loose attire of Wormold and Hasselbacher and armed with an umbrella that gives him the air of a dotty old-time before the Second World War. And the storyteller's scathing indictment of the foolhardy bravado of the British intelligence to impress their cousins with a hurriedly assembled network of agents in Central America loses none of its satirical edge.
In his own words, Greene deemed his book to be an inadequate portrait of Havana and Cuba at a very crucial moment in history. He bemoaned that Fidel Castro, for whose cause the writer had a grudging respect and empathy, was not satisfied with the novel's portrait of the country on the edge of the watershed of revolution and his own chronicling of the real horrors of Batista's militaristic rule. Fanatics and writers, however, believe otherwise.
In his introduction to Our Man In Havana, Christopher Hitchens comments candidly, 'Greene's ability to evoke a sense of place and time…are encoded in this book as in no other and remain redolent and real'. Nothing else could be closer to the truth, the unmistakably fragrant and resonant sights, sounds, smells and sensations that the writer's penchant for detail, prescience and storytelling evoke in us about the place itself. Like the nocturnal Brighton of Brighton Rock, which comes alive in its sinful, swinging glory with amusements, slot-machines, sweet shops and pubs that reek of promiscuity, Greene's Havana, on both paper and in Reed's beautifully atmospheric film, is a jolly place by the sea and under the sun, of smoky and shady bars, pimps and hawkers in the afternoon, feisty women in the streets and slinky dancers in gala night clubs, swaggering American bigwigs and bankers and English and European exiles trying to fit in and belong. It is also highly evocative, in a not so bright way, of the random bursts of police brutality and paranoia during the worst excesses of Batista's regime, particularly in telling and terse details, like the Sloppy Joe's Bar deprived of its crowd of tourists and showboating police captains who might carry cigarette cases made of human skin.
It is to the credit of Reed and the creative camaraderie that the director shared with the writer that the film becomes a beautiful and brilliant adaptation that never douses the comic potency and resonance of Greene's entertainment. Towards the end of the narrative, after the film hurtles into darker, more brooding territory, Beatrice muses, 'Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?'. With all the hilarious and not-so-hilarious things that happen in the novel and the film, does not this universally appealing message make perfect sense?
