Directed by: Carol Reed
Starring: Alec Guinness, Burl Ives, Maureen O’Hara
I, like probably most of you, only thought of Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi, but he was actually a very esteemed British actor who not only worked extensively on the stage, but was in quite a few amazing movies, including Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. Just so you know, he’s more than just Obi-Wan.
In Our Man in Havana, Guinness plays a vacuum cleaner salesman in Cuba who gets selected by a CIA agent to be a secret agent. Guinness doesn’t really know anything about spying, but he does need the money, so he decides to string the CIA along and pretend that he has a network of spies. When he sends in some plans for an enemy base (strangely shaped like a vacuum cleaner), they escalate his position and he has to scramble to cover up the fact that he actually hasn’t been doing anything all this time.
This is actually a great movie, and I heartily recommend it. Alec Guinness is great, and the web of intrigue that he accidentally gets caught up in and doesn’t even realize it is predicatable-ish, but not to the point where it takes anything away from the film.
