Jami and I have a long-running battle in that she loves all things espionage, and I just don't. I mean, I'll watch Slow Horses or The Bourne movies, but those are only really tangentially "espionage" - they're more action shows/movies that happen to feature spies. (Ooh, I also really love the Melissa McCarthy film Spy, but that's because it's very funny.) Real espionage, the Le Carre type, tends to the melancholic. The life of a spy is unglamorous and lonely, from what I can gather. (The truly excellent show Patriot does a good job of picking at this feature of it, which is why I don't think I want to re-watch it, but you absolutely should seek it out.) She got to hankerin' again last night and suggested the Richard Burton Spy Who Came In From The Cold, so I countered with this one, in part because it's supposed to be a comedy. And, although it definitely has a very sad death and a very tense scene where our hero seeks revenge, it is in general pretty light. Which I found surprising given my limited Graham Greene experience (all of Brighton Rock and the first few chapters of The Power and the Glory until I couldn't take the bloody Catholicism any more) which tended to the miserable.
Jami swears she'd seen it before, and in fact that we'd both seen it before, and while the beginning, in a vacuum cleaner salesroom, did seem familiar, I'm almost certain I hadn't. Perhaps it was because she'd read the book. Anyway, you couldn't fault the pedigree of those involved: directed by Carol "Third Man" Reed! Starring Alec Guinness! Featuring Burl Ives and a slew of great British character actors - Noël Coward! Ralph Richardson!
Maurice Denham and Raymond Huntley (even if you don't recognize the names, you'd recognize the faces). And throw in Maureen O'Hara and, in probably the most surprising role, the 50's TV comedian Ernie Kovacs as the rather sinister local (Cuban) police chief (nicknamed "The Red Vulture") Captain Segura. (I'm ashamed to say I assumed the actor was Hispanic, but I thought the same of Eli Wallach in the Westerns he was in, so I'm easily fooled.)
Anyway, the basic plot is that Alec Guinness's Jim Wormold is a proprietor of said vacuum cleaner dealership in pre-revolution Havana, whose main troubles are that his wife left him and ran off leaving him to raise his daughter, Milly, who has grown up (to about 17?) to be a magnet for wolf-whistles and a spendthrift, and he's not selling many vacuum cleaners. Into his life and his showroom walks Coward's (rather buffoonish - the British Secret Service does not come off well in this film) Hawthorne,
who recruits him (with offers of untold $$ - just after Wormold's daughter has bought a horse and wants to join the local country club to ride it in) for the purpose of in turn recruiting agents under him and gathering intelligence. He happily takes and spends the money, but quickly realizes he's hopeless at recruiting people (he just drives them away in alarm), so he tells all to his best friend, WWI-but-not-II veteran German ex-pat Dr. Hasselbacher (Ives, doing a not-too-cheesy German accent),
who advises him just to make up stories. This Wormold does prove adept in, but goes too far when he sends drawings supposedly of huge industrial buildings spotted by one of his recruits, a pilot, when flying over a hidden valley. The problem is that he models them on his vacuum cleaner
and when Hawthorne sees them he recognizes them (but not before they've been shown to all kinds of high muk-a-muks in the government and military, so that Hawthorne realizes exposing Wormold will count against him too). Hawthorne's solution is to send Maureen O'Hara's Mrs. Beatrice Severn to keep an eye on him (without telling her his suspicions).
She is Mrs. in name only, because, as with Wormold, her spouse ran off. Wormold is forced into more contortions in preventing her from meeting his "recruits," and sadly his confabulations prove fatal because he invents a pilot called Morez, forgetting that there exists just such a pilot, and, because his messages are being intercepted by Cold War rivals (spoiler alert: Hasselbacher has been recruited (with threats and intimidation) to translate his code, and thinks it's harmless because he knows Wormold is making everything up) Morez gets killed. This causes a crisis in conscience in Hasselbacher and he alerts Wormold that his life is in danger when Wormold is giving a speech at a meeting of vacuum cleaner salesmen. (In fact Hawthorne had already told him that an attempt would be made to poison him (and it's first by John Le Mesurier,
who isn't even credited) so it's especially tragic that (ANOTHER SPOILER) Hasselbacher is killed for giving the warning). Meanwhile The Red Vulture has been hanging around,
mainly because he wants to marry Milly, but also because he's basically a one-man Stasi - certainly much more competent than any of the actual spies) and he has played Wormold tape of Hasselbacher's handler talking to him on the phone, and he has a stutter, so Wormold recognizes his adversary when a fellow vacuum cleaner salesman has a stutter. This person's attempt to poison him is thereby thwarted (alas, a little Dachshund gets it instead), and then Wormold decides he finally has to do something brave and spy-like and get revenge for his old friend. This entails getting a gun, and this he achieves by using the many tiny bottles of whisky/bourbon he has been collecting (with help from Hasselbacher - the last one for his collection is found in his dead hand) to play a boozy game of checkers so that Segura passes out and his gun can be used.
Will Wormold survive? Will Beatrice (who has grown very fond of Wormold (it's mutual)) forgive his lying? Will he be put away in the Tower of London for treason? Well, let's just say the ending is a bit happier than Brighton Rock. Although the fact that Graham Greene wasn't bumped off by MI6 shows either that they can take being made fools of, or that they really are incompetent.
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