Beat the Devil (1954)

There are times when you look at a movie and you have to say "the devil made them do it." This is one of those cases, as a little known novel- Beat The Devil by James Helvick adapted by a writer Claud Cockburn whose writing is best known as the source of Cabaret, then adapted by Truman Capote and John Huston plus a couple of other writers, and you wind up with something oddly eccentric. Then you give the film a very low budget and film it all in Europe with several fairly well known actors and expect the cast to carry the film. It almost works though I am not sure if the cast or the writers got over paid for this one.The British part of the humor stands out, the tuna can not be put any further into a cheek than it is here. Oddities scream out in galore. Gina Lollobrigida is Bogart's wife, who oddly is not cast as an Italian though she seems very much to be one. Jennifer Jones is married to Edward Underdown who is sickly all the time while she is lying about him being an English Noble type. Both women seem to stray to each others husbands, though neither woman seems into either of their men, except using them for money and status.Bogart is doing business with a group of con men headed by Robert Morley and Peter Lorre, and yet he is performing a con job on them, and balancing the two eccentric ladies in his life. There is a rich texture to the cast, script, and story yet the film is done on the cheap. Look for Bernard Lee, M in the classic Bond films, as Insp. Jack Clayton, trying to make nonsense of this whole thing.The film sort of starts near the end, then goes back to the beginning and sort of fills in the strange world with a lot of the smoke and mirrors. That is what this film is, subtle humor with A List Talent performing on a shoe string budget with famous writing adopting a little known novel into a odder film. It kind of reminds me of Fairly Odd Parents being done live without actual parents while the kids are using crayons to color in a slang dictionary without a printed book to base the meanings on.

Having grown up on those classic black and white films of the 30s and 40s as a child I was fascinated by Humphrey Bogart. Not a great looking lead actor but not horrid either, Bogart was the everyman of the day, a guy like everyone else but who always had an answer. He was a tough guy who could work his way out of any jam, as adept at being the hero as he was the villain. While I had the chance to see many of his films there were a few I never quite seemed to find for one reason or another. BEAT THE DEVIL was one of those films.Made in 1953 BEAT THE DEVIL reteamed Bogart with director John Huston. The duo had performed well together with films like THE MALTESE FALCON, THE TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE and THE African QUEEN so one would expect more success to follow. This wasn't the case as many critics were not fond of this film. After watching it I can understand why. The movie feels like a film out of time, made way before many of the plot elements would become acceptable to audiences.Bogart plays Billy Dannreuther, a wheeler dealer stuck in a small Italian village with his wife Maria (Gina Lollobrigida) as well as several other passengers of a freighter en route to Africa. Billy is the driving force with connections to a local willing to assist in the purchase of a field full of uranium, a piece of land worth millions and held by an unknowing owner. Among the other characters stranded are Billy's backers, Peterson (Robert Morley), Julius O'Hara (Peter Lorre), Ravello (Marco Tulli) and Major Jack Ross (Ivor Barnard), a motley crew at best. None of the partners trust each other let alone Billy.Also on board the ship are an English couple on holiday also headed for Africa, Harry Chelm (Edward Underdown) and his wife Gwendolen (Jennifer Jones). Gwendolen is prone for flights of fancy, guessing who is who and what their stories are in an attempt to raise herself above the boring life she leads. She makes the mistake of going one step further when she finds herself drawn to Billy and falling in love. This is the first item that to me felt a bit off. I've come to expect fast forward romances in films today but one made in 1953 seemed odd.Back and forth situations of trust and deception follow as the various members of the party attempt to outdo one another in a rush to get to Africa and the lad deal. Billy tells them to stay calm and they'll get there just fine but since these are an untrustworthy group the odds of that happening are slim. Harry isn't aware of what is going on under his nose with Gwendolen and Billy and the same holds true for Maria who seems more concerned with how she plans to spend the money they will make as well as dreams of all things English.So with all of this going on why doesn't the movie work? To begin with the film has a tremendously slow pacing to it, more like reading a book than watching a movie. The high points are rarely treated as such and it feels like a level film rather than one with ups and downs that move a plot forward. The film also suffers from poor cinematography and film stock being used to make the picture, looking like a washed out foreign film of the time rather than something Hollywood would have produced. Between the cast, the director and a writer of stature (the script was written by Truman Capote) the expectations are high but never met.The end result is a film that drudges along and doesn't deliver until the final shot. Bogart was said to have been unhappy with the film, perhaps because he helped bankroll it and it lost money, saying "Only phonies like it." Critics either loved it or hated it and the reception wasn't as huge as one would expect. The owners of the film let it fall into public domain stature which may show their lack of faith in it as well. This accounts for the number of copies of the film available.On the plus side is the resurrection of the film for fans of the feature as well as all things Bogart. The Film Detective is a company that seems intent on presenting many features that have fallen into public domain in as best a condition as possible. To my knowledge this is the first time that the film has been offered in blu-ray format. The presentation is well made with a clean copy which is more than many companies who prey upon fans can claim when it comes to public domain titles. The Film Detective offers their products with minimal to non-existent extras (in this case a trailer) but movie fans are more concerned with the movie itself as opposed to umpteen extras. In this case the movie is the best presentation you are likely to find.Fans of Bogart and Huston anxious to complete their libraries will want to pick this one up. If you love old classic films you might enjoy it. Perhaps it's not their best effort but it is interesting and worth seeing at least once.

"Beat the Devil" opens with the arrest of four criminals seeming to come straight from cartoons' universe. Petersen (Robert Morley) is the biggest, fattest, obviously the leader, at the same height, there is the thinner Italian crook Ravello, and on the vertically-challenged department, the rat-faced Major Ross who makes Peter Lorre look almost like a conventional leading man.The least that can be said is that these guys don't quite exude truthfulness especially when they pose as vacuum cleaners' salesmen. When confronting an Arab sheik, Petersen uses some Pidgin English to explain his presence, the Arab reveals himself a worldly and most literate gentleman rightfully suspecting the men to be smugglers. Petersen then invites him to look at them, to see by himself that they don't have the 'working face' … the efforts these natural born crook-looking fellows pull to all look as respectable as possible is as desperate as hilarious.And as if it wasn't hilarious enough, Jennifer Jones intervenes, claiming that she's a British subject and therefore any harm done to her might create a diplomatic incident, to which the Arab dryly retorts that in his country, woman can move their lips but no word they say is ever heard. Yet later, the man reveals himself to be a fan of Rita Hayworth, a weakness that Bogart's character will cleverly exploit. Now, asking the purpose of the Arab sequence in the course of the story is as irrelevant as wondering where the film is leading up to, at that part. "Beat the Devil" is simply a big joke, an enjoyable, truculent and extremely entertaining one.It's the mark of great directors when they depart from their usual standards of seriousness and put the very trademarks they pioneered into self-parodying perspective. "Beat the Devil" is a remarkable demonstration of John Huston's caustic humor and self-detachment. You can tell that Petersen is a parody of Sydney Greenstreet from "The Maltese Falcon" and Morley plays the part to perfection, mixing his intimidating demeanor with irresistible goofiness. I knew there was comical potential in this actor when I saw him in "The African Queen"… and I'm glad Huston felt the same.Peter Lorre also reprises his suavely sinister character with a cigarette holder, only grinning when Petersen expects a reaction to one of his joke. His shining moment remains his unforgettable speech about time: "What is time? Swiss manufacture it. French hoard it. Italians squander it. Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. Do you know what I say? I say time is a crook." That line comes up early enough in the film, to warn the viewers that this is not a script to underestimate; indeed, it's as full of one-liners as the African lands they try to steal, are in uranium… and as priceless of course.And there is the scene-stealing Major Ross, the only character with no redeemable quality whatsoever apart from being funny: short, ugly, old and with debatable political opinions. Believing Petersen is dead, he utters: "Mussolini, Hitler, now, Petersen" and the worst is that he meant it as a compliment. This is a film where the bad guys bring the most laughs, and where the straight man is Bogart, as a freelance and cynical businessman, with an uncertain approach toward legal matters. He and his wife, played by Gina Lollobrigida, meet an English couple, the Chelms, formed by Jennifer Jones and Edward Underdown. Infatuations grow on each side but since the purity of their motives are questionable, so is the accusation of adultery.Anyway, this colorful gallery reunites in a small port in Italy waiting for the steamer to be repaired so they can go to Africa. The effect of the first frames is startling, the grainy texture of the copy is as poor and under-restored as a (coincidentally) Italian neo-realist movie and the amateurish quality of the sound makes it feel like set in the 20's. We're far from the grandeur and flashiness of "Moby Dick" and "Moulin Rouge", or the menacing shadowy atmosphere of "The Maltese Falcon" and "Key Largo". But this is still a John Huston's film, and only a director so capable of the best can pull so many efforts in a seemingly-worst and contribute to an unintentional masterpiece of B-movie.Through adventure, Film-Noir and comedy, "Beat the Devil" plays with the Hustonian's usual themes: generally about losers trying to satisfy their greed only to become blinded by their own principles or weaknesses (sometimes both are the same) and this translates in "Beat the Devil" with the language of comedy. Whether it's through our criminal quartet, Jones who pretends her husband is a rich landowner, Bogart who gets sucked in the middle of a scheme, ignoring the pay-off, it's like a nihilistic escape whose only purpose is to create funny situations in the kind of exotic and international settings cherished by Huston.Billy Wilder mastered comic writing so much, he couldn't have left something purposeless to the story while John Huston took a novel, adapted it on a day-to-day basis with a 28-year old Truman Capote, and the result, as it seems, is a succession of situations where the character's reliability is constantly put in equation and where every secondary character has something funny to say, whether the imbibed boat captain who wants no trouble in his boat or Bogart's chauffeur who demands reparation after an accident, that Bogart gave him the car being "beside the point".As if the story embraced its own adventurous and risky spirit, the result is a film that doesn't take itself seriously, which is not just ahead of its time, but of our own era of timid, star-studded and money-driven filmmaking. "Beat the Devil" was a gutsy movie, but 60 years later, it's regarded as a classic. I guess time did justice to it, proof that it isn't such a crook, after all.

This is a film that has be described as a " thriller , " a " comedy " A "romance " a " drama " and an " adventure " . In other words it has elements of being a cross genre movie . The cross genre movie was very popular in the 1980s when you'd get the likes of AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN and TOP GUN where the girls would flock to the cinema to swoon all over the hunky male star and get caught up in the on screen romance while boys would get involved in the macho culture of the military drama . In other words there's two distinct genres to the movie .Watching BEAT THE DEVIL you're aware there's no real distinct elements to the story There is indeed different elements at play here from a screenplay by Truman Capote but comes across as being very uneasy with itself as characters discuss love , fascism and other aspects of the human condition . This existentialist discussion might work very much better in a French New Wave movie but jars in a film that resembles a British B movie despite the exotic locations . For some reason everything has a dullness to it that one would never expect from HustonThis is a film that seems more easier to market down to the casting rather than the storytelling . Humphrey Bogart was of course a screen legend but he seems to lack his usual charisma . People on this page have commentated that he looks ill and certainly you get the impression that his heart isn't in this movie . Indeed everyone involved has been much better in almost everything they've done and explains why BEAT THE DEVIL is relatively obscure when you think of the talent behind and in front of the screen