Raymond Huntley

In the first shot, a quintessentially British man in a dark suit and hat, tightly rolled umbrella, and immobile face, strides along Havana streets besieged by grinning musicians and hawkers. Hawthorne (Noel Coward) is a Secret Service official based in Jamaica charged with recruiting a group of secret agents to report on Cuban military activities for a monthly stipend. Hawthorne approaches Jim Wormold (Alec Guinness), an expatriate Englishman living in Havana in the late 1950s with his beautiful teenage daughter Milly (Jo Morrow), who is attending a Catholic all girls school. Jim has lived in Cuba for fifteen years, and despite the rocky political climate, considers it home. Wormold's spare time consists of drinks with German Dr. Hasselbacher (Burl Ives) and fawning over his daughter, who has reached that precarious threshold between childhood and adulthood. Milly is being trailed by police captain Segura (Ernie Kovacs), who is friendly with the nuns at Millys school, and is looking for a traditional and pretty young woman to be his wife from among the graduating students. Milly, a dazzling blonde, is his target. When the very conspicuous Hawthorne shows up, Segura guesses that something of interest to the police may be going on, and makes inquiries hoping to use the information for blackmailing Jim in his favor, if necessary. Jim owns a vacuum cleaner shop but isn't successful enough, as he wants to provide greater luxuries for Milly, such as finishing school in Switzerland, and Milly has some expensive expectations of her own, such as owning a horse. Jim says yes to Hawthorne because of his money needs, but he has no clue about spying. Hawthorne shows him how to encode messages for telegraphing his reports and gives him general pointers. Hawthorne just tells him to approach people he knows, but that gets Jim nowhere. Jim approaches one of his trusted employees but the man misunderstands and thinks Jim is asking for prostitutes. Several times during the rest of the movie, a prostitute is brought to him by this employee. Prodded by Millys wishes to have a horse, Jim gets the Secret Service to pay for his membership in a hugely expensive country club, with the excuse that he needs access to a place where he meets important people. When he approaches members of the country club, his social ineptitude creates confusions and they think he is trying to come onto them. Instead of spying, Wormold spends most of his time drinking at the country club, which he can finally afford. Jims closest friend, a former German army officer, Dr. Hasselbacher, suggests that the best secrets are known to no one, so Jim decides to pretend to have a list of agents and provide fictional tales for the benefit of the bosses in London. Hasselbacher opines that Jim would not be doing anything immoral because countries feel obligated to play a game and spy on each other, and it might has well be him who gets paid. As he does nothing real to report, Jim pretends first to recruit agents and then that they discover secret constructions. In order to have a semblance of credibility, the names and professions he gives his fake agents are names and professions of real people. When London messages demand some information beyond lists of names, Jim notices that images of his vacuum cleaners, if enlarged and doctored, look like odd buildings having a scientific or military purpose. He sends drawings to England, and the spy boss C (Ralph Richardson) is deeply impressed. Some other reports are inspired by comic strips. He is seen as the best agent in the Western Hemisphere, and the spy agency decides to send him support staff. Soon Beatrice Severn (Maureen O'Hara) arrives in Havana, sent by C to be his "bookkeeper" and assistant. Beatrice finds Jim romantically attractive. When she begins to catch on to the deceptions, she keeps quiet despite misgivings. There are others who get suspicious of Wormold at the Agency. One agent comments to C that the drawings look like parts of a vacuum cleaner, enlarged. Hawthorne hears this while he is behind C, and realizes what Guinness is sending, but he keeps quiet. Captain Segura is aware, after hearing of Jims approaches to local fellows, that Jim was recruiting spies, but he bides his time, as his interest is getting Jim's consent for him to marry Milly. Milly accepts some courting, but her interests are rather with her horse rather than marrying. Dr. Hasselbacher, tempted by Jims reports of easy money in exchange for false information, also starts to sell lies, judging that no significant harm results from the deception. Wormolds originally harmless fraud eventually becomes dangerous. As British Intelligence agencies begin to take his work seriously, so does the other side, and thus Wormold is a wanted man, dead or alive. Spys from the other side begin to decode his cables and start disrupting his network. One of the men whom Wormold pretended was one of his agents dies in a suspicious accident. An engineer named Cifuentes (Grégoire Aslan) whom Jim approached multiple times at the country club is kidnapped and dropped off at Jims doorstep bound and gagged. These events give London the impression that Wormold's networks are under attack. Hawthorne has Jim go to Jamaica for consultations, where he warns him that Jim's discovery of military secrets is so impressive that the other sides agents have decided to silence him by assassination, most likely by poisoning at a banquet Jim has to attend as part of his vacuum cleaner business. Hawthorne instructs Jim in a variety of techniques to avoid being poisoned by food or drink. Jim manages to figure out the assassin is none other than a friendly man he met on the flight to Kingston, but he is unable to prevent the murder of his friend Dr. Hasselbacher. In seeking to avenge his friend, Jim arranges to have a meeting with Segura, ostensibly to discuss the possible courtship of Milly. Jim must get Segura so drunk that he passes out, so he can steal a loaded gun. As both of them are avid checkers players, he arranges a game of checkers to be played with miniature bottles of liquor. Each time one is captured, it must be opened and drunk immediately. As the captain is in fact a better player, the Captain gets totally, drunk, and Jim takes the gun to kill the would be assassin. Pretending friendship, he has made arrangements to go out on the town with the assassin, using himself as a decoy, assuming that the assassin will use the occasion to have him ambushed and killed by others somewhere. He tells the assassin they will be going to a couple of semi clandestine night clubs, giving their names, but in fact he goes to others, so the ambushers are sent to the wrong place, the assassin is isolated, and Jim shoots him with Seguras gun at the door of a brothel. Captain Segura wakes from his drunken binge unaware of what happened. The next day, however, after Jim and Milly attend Hasselbachers funeral, the captain orders Jim deported, and he must return to London. He tells all details of what he has done to Beatrice, who decides to quit the spy business and return to London with him. Meantime, Beatrice and Milly have become friends, Milly accepts Beatrice as a future stepmother. Accompanied by Beatrice and Milly, Jim goes to a meeting with C and other spy bosses in London. While he is waiting to be seen, the officials discuss what they should do with him. To reveal to the Prime Minister and the other top brass that Jim concocted all his intelligence would have a damaging effect on the intelligence aparatus, so they come up with a solution. A story is fabricated, claiming the hardware that Jim's agent had seen had since been dismantled. Wormold is told he is to receive an O.B.E, and the secret service offers him a position teaching espionage classes to new recruits in London. With this money, he can afford to send Milly to the fancy school in Switzerland.

A Cardinal, a hero of resistance, endures brutal interrogation with unshakable resolve, refusing to confess his supposed treason. As his tormentor's methods fail, the interrogator finds himself unexpectedly moved by pity for indomitable. A Cardinal is arrested for treason against the state. As a Prince of his church, he's a popular hero of this people for his resistance against the Nazis during the war, and his resistance after his country again fell to another totalitarian conqueror. In prison, his interrogator is determined to get a confession of guilt from the strong-willed man, and thus destroy his power over his people. The verbal and psychological battles are gripping and powerful, not even the increasing pressures put upon the Cardinal can force him to weaken, not even solitary confinement, continuous blazing light in his cell, sleeplessness, efforts to persuade him he is going mad. And yet, in the deepening conflict, the superbly indomitable prisoner creates a tremendous pity on his tormentor. —alfiehitchie

Professor Horatio Smith, while seeming very unassuming, rescues victims of Nazi persecution during World War II. Spring, 1939. The Nazis are frustrated that a number of men, German nationals and non-nationals alike that have refused to work for them, have managed to escape from the country with the aid of unknown rescuers or perhaps a sole rescuer. As such, the Nazis have begun to round up such men who have remained in Germany to house them in concentration camps as enemies of the Reich, all this information quashed by the Ministry of Propaganda. Meanwhile, Horatio Smith, a mild-mannered, pacifistic, often absent-minded and seemingly misogynistic Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge University, has recruited six of his male students to accompany him to Germany on his latest three-month post-term expedition into his research of whether an Aryan race did ever exist in Central Europe, work supported by the German government. What they and everyone else is unaware of is that Smith is that rescuer, this trip to Germany just a cover for his latest mission to free whoever needs to be freed from the Nazis. He realizes that his outward demeanor to the world makes him the perfect person for such work in no one ever suspecting him. He wants to retain his secret identity as the rescuer as the fewer people who know or need to know, the safer it is for all concerned. Coinciding with Smith's expedition, Nazi General von Graum, who is leading the investigation into the escapes, believes the rescuer is not only British, but will be attending a reception at the British Embassy in Berlin. As such, he enlists the assistance of a young woman by the name of Ludmilla Kohls to help identify the perpetrator at the reception, she who he is certain can and will assist and may be more perceptive about such matters to Smith's detriment than von Graum, he suspecting the typical strong, masculine type. —Huggo It is mid-1939 and both Germany and England are preparing for an inevitable conflict. Professor Horatio Smith, an effete academic, asks his students to come with him to the continent to engage in an archaeological dig. When his students discover that the professor is the man responsible for smuggling a number of enemies of the Nazi state out of Germany, they enthusiastically join him in his fight, but things get complicated when one of his students brings a woman who is secretly working for the Gestapo into their circle. —Alfred Jingle