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Our Man In Havana Vacuum Style Toy Prop

Currency:USD Category:Memorabilia / Movie - Memorabilia Start Price:50.00 USD Estimated At:800.00 - 1,000.00 USD
Our Man In Havana Vacuum Style Toy Prop
Most of the greatest punch lines in film history are literally that: a famous last line like "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship", "Frankly Scarllet, I don't give a damn", or "The horror, the horror..." However, even more memorable are the endings that use a visual joke with a prop that give a major final "punch" to a film. One of the most famous, memorable and iconic is from the beloved classic "Our Man In Havana" based on Graham Greene's powerful send-up the British Intelligence Service (so much so, that a neon sign "Bond" is seen several times blinking on a street in the film, as a "smack" to Greene's rival writer Ian Fleming who was making his own British Spy Novels at the time!). In the story, a quiet "non-entity" of a man, with the unfortunate name of Jim Wormold I(Alec Guinness) who is just barley irking out a living with a vacuum cleaner store in Havana is approached by a British Secret Service agent (Ralph Richardson). Needing money to keep his teenage daughter happy, Wormold accepts their proposal, and discovers that the more "information" he gives them, the more they pay him. therefore, he just makes things up. Knowing only vacuums, he creates a whole "discovery" of an enemy military base, and uses drawings of vacuum parts supposedly drawn by him and his agents to prove it. Of course this causes all kinds of problems when he's found out, but as in any grand comedy all ends up well. The movie was the last to actually be made in Havana, since during production Castro began his revolution and took over the government! However, being a huge fan of movies (he even had a small part in DeMille's "The Ten Commandments"), he allowed them to finish he film, and even visited the set several times! At the very end of the film, after we see the complete Hypocrisy of the British Intelligence Service, Guinness is on the street with his girlfriend and daughter, who is urging a 1957 Jaguar Mk. VIII. As a homage to the end of capitalism in Cuba, one of the last of the native street merchants is selling outrageous vacuum style toys that ride around in circles belching smoke. It resembles more than just a little one of his own designs! Wormold picks one up distastefully and sees on the side: "Made In Japan". With that he hands it back as one would a dead rat, and walks away. End of movie! Only three of these amazing pieces were made for the production and are seen in the sequence. This is one of those originals.