- Also known as:
- Unknown
- Year:
- 1960
- Country/ies of Origin:
- Predominant Genre:
- Comedy
- Best Performances:
- Alec GUINNESS
- Burl IVES
- Maureen O’HARA
- Plot:
- Man selling vacuum cleaners in Havana, accepts a job with the Intelligence Service. As he has nothing to report, he invents facts and pretends to recruit agents.
- Themes:
- Political Correctness
- Similar To (in Plot, Theme or Style):
- Unknown
- Review Format:
- DVD
Cold-War Fun
Sadly, less than the sum of its excellent parts in spite – or perhaps because of - being adapted by Graham Greene from his own novel.
Burl IVES is particularly good as a seedy, down at heel, supposed ex-Nazi; while Maureen O’HARA - as the film’s conscience - openly wonders whether her spying job really makes the world safer for democracy. Wouldn’t it all be so much better if our loyalties were to our humanity rather than to country?
Greene also scores in his depiction of Alec GUINNESS’s horse-mad, virginal daughter – a feast for Freudians - and in the fact that spies’ duplicity causes as much carnage as it prevents. A rather bleak spy-movie spoof, set in a non-007 world that Greene had intimate knowledge of.
One has to laugh or one would have to cry at the sheer folly of much of the Cold War’s ideological combat.
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