Our Man in Havana, The Man in the White Suit, What a Way To Go!, & Far from the Madding Crowd

Our Man in Havana comes in this ridiculous Martini Movies package, with instructions for making martinis and picking up women. What the hell? It's a Carol Reed spy movie, based on a Graham Greene novel, starring Alec Guinness and Noel Coward, it needs nothing else to recommend it. Guinness is a vacuum cleaner salesman who embezzles money from the British government to run a spy ring in pre-Castro Cuba (filmed in Castro's Cuba due to it attacking Batista's corrupt regime), and the ridiculousness that ensues. It's funny and well-made, everything you'd expect. And it ends with two terrible cleaning puns. How can you hate a movie like that? I certainly can't.

The Man in the White Suit is the second in my little Alec Guinness mini-fest. It's about a dude who invents a suit that cannot get dirty. And everyone wants it destroyed. It's an Ealing Studios comedy, so there's a comedic sheen, along with some very clever plot twists, even if it never quite gets to loud guffaws.

What a Way To Go! is a Shirley MacLaine starrer, with Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum, Gene Kelly, Dean Martin, and Dick Van Dyke starring as her husbands. Each story of how they made millions and then died is told in a different film style: French New Wave, big budget Hollywood, musical, and silent. It's also a comedy. That isn't funny. But clearly cost a lot of money. Comedies, as a general rule should be funny.

Far from the Madding Crowd is very long. There was an intermission. It's also based on a Thomas Hardy Novel. So it was very depressing. Good acting from Terence Stamp and Julie Christie, but mostly just very depressing.