Our Man In Havana (Blu-ray)

Our Man in Havana (1959) is the great Graham Greene’s saucy adaptation of his own novel, starring the singular Alec Guinness as a vacuum cleaner salesman in pre-revolutionary Cuba, bizarrely recruited (by Noel Coward, no less) as a British Intelligence spy. As his imagination turns out to be more highly developed than his espionage skills, the plot thickens. An extraordinary cast also includes Burl Ives, Maureen O’Hara, Ernie Kovacs, and Ralph Richardson; notably the film, gloriously directed by Carol Reed in his third collaboration with Greene, was shot in Havana just two months after the fall of the Batista regime, with the full permission of Fidel Castro.