As for the gathering at Hemingway’s home, he described everybody getting “thoroughly pissed.” His location shooting and five-night stay were now over, and he flew off to New York the next day feeling “very peculiar.”īoth drank and chased women, but the American’s all-action physicality was the polar opposite of Greene’s awkward impracticality. Coward reportedly mouthed “ mañana” to a local official as they departed. The Englishman did not attend Hemingway’s cocktail party later that day at his San Francisco de Paula home.Īlso in Greene’s absence, Coward described how a car whisked some of them off at lunchtime after shooting at Sloppy Joe’s to meet “the famous Fidel Castro.” After waiting for more than an hour, they gave up on their host. As Mallin relates, “it was perfunctory they didn’t like each other.” According to Ted Scott’s “Interesting if True” column, Hemingway wore only a “beard, shorts and sports shirt” and merely said “Howdy” to Greene. However, despite their shared depressive natures and predilection for the world’s war zones as foreign correspondents, the visiting Englishman and the Havana-residing American did not hit it off. Jay Mallin recalls introducing Hemingway to Greene at Sloppy Joe’s bar. Long-term Havana resident Ernest Hemingway dropped by to witness proceedings and chat with old friend Noël Coward between takes. On Tuesday, April 14, the crew filmed a key scene in Sloppy Joe’s at the corner of Zulueta and Ánimas. Above, Hemingway with Alec Guinness and Noel Coward during filming.
Describing his work on set the next day, Coward wrote in his diary: “On Monday all I did was walk about the streets very fast watched by thousands of bewildered Cubans and surrounded, for protection only, by hirsute armed policemen.” Greene in Havana during filming. He appeared rigid in a tight-fitting blue woolen suit and stiff white collar, topped with a homburg-the stereotypical and incongruous Englishman in the tropics, with an umbrella to boot.Ĭoward had composed and sung the classic 1930s ditty “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” decrying those expatriates foolhardy enough to emerge under the oppressive midday sun in tropical foreign climes. SIS’s man in the Caribbean Henry Hawthorne (played by Noël Coward) was dressed less fittingly for the ninety-plus-degree-Fahrenheit heat. It added, “Graham Greene stood under a crumbling archway, behind the camera, a Leica dangling from his neck, intently watching and occasionally recording the goings-on.” Meanwhile, Carol Reed directed in a light linen open-necked Cuban guayabera hanging loosely over his trousers. The New York Times described a band of roving musicians and assorted tropical fruits arranged neatly on a corner stand and a cart laden with colorful local flowers. Shooting of background scenes on Our Man in Havana began on Sunday, Apin Plaza Vieja, a cobblestoned square with chrome yellow façades, and former location for bartering and selling slaves.
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