60s Spies A-Go-Go at Film Forum

Comfortable it ain’t, but you can’t beat Film Forum for its repertoire programming. Earlier this week, we endured the shoddy seating and chilly temperatures to watch a double feature: “Our Man in Havana” (1959), followed by “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” (1965).

Of the two, “Our Man in Havana” is a better all-around movie: James Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman in pre-Castro Cuba, accidentally gets recruited into the British secret service. Completely at a loss for how to be a spy, he begins making things up about not just about the spies he’s supposedly enlisted to the cause but also about clandestine activities taking place in the mountains (he even sends in models of advanced weaponry, based on his vacuum cleaners). Things get sticky when London sends a secretary and radio man to help Wormold run his network, and stickier still when his ‘agents’ start turning up dead. Graham Greene wrote the screenplay based on his eponymous novel—and the result’s full of jokes, shots of Cuba, attentive mise-en-scene, and themes about the importance of imagination and fantasy in the life of any worthwhile (or would-be) spy.

Then we left fun, sunny Cuba for the cold, cold war of “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.” Also based on a novel, this movie follows Alec Leamas as he resigns from the British secret service and defects to eastern Europe—or does he? It’s a gray and cerebral take on the gray and cerebral nature of morality. As the movie goes to great lengths to point out, rigid adhesion to any belief—capitalist or communist—inevitably leads to destructive, antisocial behavior.