This picture is based on one of Graham Greene's "entertainments" (Greene's term) but is more satire than thriller. However, things do turn dark at the end.
Every one of Graham Greene's novels contains a moral dilemma which the protagonist must face. Most also have a fair amount of his (decidedly leftist) political views, for Greene was both a Communist and an Anglo-Catholic.
In a few off moments in this film, some these views are expressed but by secondary characters, not by Jim Wermold the protagonist himself. Captain Segura the police chief, played to chilling perfection by Ernie Kovacs, expounds on the "torturable classes" in society, ending with the pronouncement that torture is always "by mutual agreement". {Tell that to the American pilots tortured by the North Vietnamese!] True or not, this is a restatement of Marxist dogma: history as class struggle.
Later, Maureen O'Hara as the secretary sent out by Intelligence headquarters in London, on learning that all of Wermold's reports to Home Office were fabrications and that he has taken their money on false pretenses, asks why people must be loyal to countries, anyway and isn't it better just to be loyal to people. This is also is a restatement, this time of a famous quote from E.M. Forster, that if he had to choose between betraying his country and betraying a friend, he hoped he would have to courage to betray his country.
While these seemed to be mere philosophical musings in 1958, we know looking back that there was a great deal of active betrayal of Britain and its intelligence services right up to that time by former members of a student group at Cambridge University which did include E.M. Forster--though not Graham Greene, an Oxonian.
Perhaps Graham Greene had mixed feelings about Americans but his detestation of the United States was undisguised. He saw America as run by an exploiting Big Business class with the government in Washington a sham, exercising no real power. Any cruelties or injustices practiced in Latin America were naturally attributable to this country and the rapacious businessmen who ran it, in his view.
Celebrated for his inventive comedy, Ernie Kovacs played such a convincing Latin that his work here might have led to a second career as a dramatic actor had he not had that fatal traffic accident a few years later.
Every one of Graham Greene's novels contains a moral dilemma which the protagonist must face. Most also have a fair amount of his (decidedly leftist) political views, for Greene was both a Communist and an Anglo-Catholic.
In a few off moments in this film, some these views are expressed but by secondary characters, not by Jim Wermold the protagonist himself. Captain Segura the police chief, played to chilling perfection by Ernie Kovacs, expounds on the "torturable classes" in society, ending with the pronouncement that torture is always "by mutual agreement". {Tell that to the American pilots tortured by the North Vietnamese!] True or not, this is a restatement of Marxist dogma: history as class struggle.
Later, Maureen O'Hara as the secretary sent out by Intelligence headquarters in London, on learning that all of Wermold's reports to Home Office were fabrications and that he has taken their money on false pretenses, asks why people must be loyal to countries, anyway and isn't it better just to be loyal to people. This is also is a restatement, this time of a famous quote from E.M. Forster, that if he had to choose between betraying his country and betraying a friend, he hoped he would have to courage to betray his country.
While these seemed to be mere philosophical musings in 1958, we know looking back that there was a great deal of active betrayal of Britain and its intelligence services right up to that time by former members of a student group at Cambridge University which did include E.M. Forster--though not Graham Greene, an Oxonian.
Perhaps Graham Greene had mixed feelings about Americans but his detestation of the United States was undisguised. He saw America as run by an exploiting Big Business class with the government in Washington a sham, exercising no real power. Any cruelties or injustices practiced in Latin America were naturally attributable to this country and the rapacious businessmen who ran it, in his view.
Celebrated for his inventive comedy, Ernie Kovacs played such a convincing Latin that his work here might have led to a second career as a dramatic actor had he not had that fatal traffic accident a few years later.