All Fiction Should Star Alec Guinness, Burl Ives, and Noel Coward.

Our Man In Havana by Graham Greene

Admittedly, I haven't finished the book yet -- I'm about halfway through -- but since I've seen the movie, I feel confident enough to extrapolate. Barring, of course, one of those Sense and Sensibility "Willoughby's back -- and he's DRUNK?!" surprises. Somehow I don't think ol' Graham is the type.

And it's a crying shame I'll probably never get to see the movie again. It was a particularly good one, and now that I've found the book is particularly good as well, it's extra pleasant to look back upon through the soft-focus lens of recent happy memory. Normally, I would have tried to read the book first, but the lack of time -- "Half an hour before showtime? Really?" -- alas, proved my undoing.

Or rather, the opposite.

Now, as the mellifluous and careful prose washes over me and floods me with a daiquiri-like sensation, my mind's eye conjures up Alec Guinness there in Havana as Mr. Wormold, worrying over his Catholic bombshell daughter. A black bowler-clad, umbrella-toting Noel Coward turns up to -- ahem! -- solicit Mr. Wormold into the shady world of international espionage, whereupon Wormold counters by entering the even shadier realm of the fictioneer and begins creating subagents and state secrets out of whole cloth. (Or whole vacuum cleaners, at any rate.) It's hard to tell whether Captain Segura -- the Red Vulture! -- or the specter of Catholic guilt is more sinister.

In closing: the fact that Dude, Where's My Car? is widely available and this movie only crops up on reels every decade or so is perhaps the most profound cultural loss I have personally encountered. Thank the gods we have Mr. Greene's novel to console us. Damn you, Sean Patrick Scott!!