Alec Guinness, Noel Coward and Ralph Richardson star in Graham Greene’s story of a vacuum cleaner salesman who is recruited by MI5 as a spy. 1959-made British comedy. Spy spoof based on the novel by Graham Greene. Alec Guinness stars as Jim Wormold, an English expatriate who sells vacuum cleaners in Havana. His life is irrevocably changed when he is recruited by Hawthorne (Noel Coward), and pressed into service as an operative of MI6, which he reluctantly agrees to so he can earn extra money for his seventeen-year-old daughter.