My prior experience of director Carol Reed, while pretty good, did not whet my appetite for more. But when I saw that he got back together with author Graham Greene, I thought that this might be the closest I'd get to another The Third Man.
Shot shortly after the Cuban Revolution but set slightly before it, the film focuses on a transplanted English vacuum cleaner salesman, Jim Wormold (Alec Guinness). A member of the British Secret Service invites him to become a spy, because such a man doesn't arouse much suspicion. Netflix says he "unwittingly" agrees, but that's misleading: He knows what his employer is and what it expects of him; he just bites off more than he can chew, failing to recruit a team. Too desperate for money to admit defeat -- thanks largely to extravagant young adult daughter Milly, despite her dating the generous local despot (Ernie Kovacs) -- Wormold lies about both recruits and discoveries in espionage. By the time he receives some actual teammates, most notably his secretary (Maureen O'Hara), he starts to worry he'll be found out. But that shouldn't be his biggest worry, seeing as an unnamed enemy agency takes him as seriously as his own does. Burl Ives has a supporting role as a German friend who meets the enemy.
I actually saw fit to pause the movie and look up a synopsis, twice, not because the plot was complicated but because I couldn't make sense of the characters' actions. What kind of professional spy hires a stranger with no relevant background, gives him a few instructions, and lets him go unsupervised? And how could Wormold ever have thought it a good idea to lie on matters of national security? Did he think it was a game with no likely consequences for anyone he cared about? It's rare to get a protagonist so selfish and stupid. And possibly lazy; we don't see him approach more than two potential recruits. Milly must take after him.
"Oh," you say, "but you shouldn't expect much intelligence from characters in what's clearly a comedy!" To which I reply: Is it? Yes, the setup satirizes the gullibility of the BSS; yes, my sources count comedy among its genres; but from my standpoint, it makes little effort to be funny. There are memorable lines, but they're no more comical in frequency or magnitude than you'd find in The Big Sleep. Non-villainous people die, and their deaths are certainly not played for laughs. Once you accept how foolish Wormold and his contact have been, it's primarily enjoyable as a crime drama.
OK, perspective time: I don't care much for Guinness comedies in general. Whether he's playing a career criminal (The Lavender Hill Mob, The Lady Killers), an aristocrat (Kind Hearts and Coronets), or a man mistaken for an aristocrat (The Card, Last Holiday), the humor portion leaves something to be desired. Maybe I finally came across an example so wrong for me that the gags go right over my head.
You may have some reservations about watching a movie that needed approval from Fidel Castro, shortly before his alliance with the USSR. We have him to thank for the Fulgencio Batista stand-in looking as bad as he does, as well as the level of implicit condemnation of British and American government interventions in Cuba (tho Greene had included some of that in the novel). On the other hand, some viewers consider events of the story prescient of the missile crisis.
Definitely not the next The Third Man, but at least it felt like a change of pace. I got enough out of it to justify 107 minutes' viewing. You may just get more.
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