Beat the Devil (1953) ***

Release Date: November 24, 1953

Running Time: 94 minutes

Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida, Edward Underdown, Robert Morley, Peter Lorre

Directed By: John Huston

When you pair legendary director John Huston with an all star cast that includes Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Robert Morley, and a pre James Bond era Bernard Lee, you have certain expectations. Add in a screenplay co-written by Truman Capote and based on a thriller novel by noted reformed communist author Claud Cockburn (under the pseudonym James Helvick) and those expectations hit the stratosphere. It is perhaps those lofty expectations that made Beat the Devil such a disappointment to audiences back in 1953. Upon initial screenings several minutes had to be excised, lost to time until only a few years ago when the uncut version was finally rescued and restored. The reception to this film upon initial release was bad enough that its star, Bogart, who lost quite a bit of his own money financing it, disliked it profusely. This disdain also saw the film’s copyright go without renewal leading it to drop into the public domain. Its reputation in therefore a bad one, yet to judge it so is being too harsh. The film is no Casablanca, yet there is a campiness to it that makes the proceedings a true delight to witness and the cast is clearly having a ball playing such broad characterizations amidst what should be a serious story, yet somehow is not. 

Billy Dannreuther (Bogart) and his wife Maria (Gina Lollobrigida) have fallen on rough times leading the two to reluctantly team up with four criminals: Peterson (Robert Morley), Jules (Peter Lorre), Ravello (Marco Tully) and Major Jack Ross (Ivor Barnard), who are scheming to illicitly acquire some Uranium rich land in British East Africa. The six of them are in port in Italy waiting for the ship they chartered to be repaired before they can set out for Africa. There, Billy and Maria become acquainted with another married couple, the oddly paired Harry (Edward Underdown) and his wife Gwendolen (Jennifer Jones). Harry and his wife are booked on the same ship bound for Africa. Harry is a stereotypical Englishman while his wife is flighty and prone to exaggeration. Gwendolen soon begins an affair with Billy while Maria is flirting with Harry. Gwendolen also talks up her husband in such a way that the men begin to suspect the couple may be attempting to get the land, themselves.

There are many great set pieces making up Beat the Devil, some of them technologically impressive for the time. When Peterson determines Harry may be trying to beat them to the land he abandons his fear of flying and insists on taking a plane at once. While driving to the plane their vehicle starts acting up prompting Peterson, Billy and the driver to get out and push. Unfortunately they are on a slope and the vehicle gets away from them, cruising down the road, amazingly taking corners, before finally crashing through a wall and falling into the ocean below. News of the crash gets back to the others who assume Peterson and Billy have been killed in the crash. The remaining men in turn immediately look for a way to spin this to their advantages, including Ravello who takes Harry into his confidence over the uranium scheme. 

In the original book the men never make it to Africa. That would have never worked for a film so, correctly, it was changed making the final act more cinematic. Instead, the group end up shipwrecked and captured by the Arab soldiers, the leader of whom sees right through their phony stories. Billy, through a series of lies convinces the leader to send them back to Italy right where they left off. It is just the kind of ending a film like this needs. They go around in a circle and no one gets what they really want. A letter arrives from Harry, who escaped the ship before the engines had failed, leading to the shipwreck. This letter punctuates the shaggy-dog aspect of this tale so poignantly that even Bogart’s Billy is forced into laughter, proclaiming loudly, “This is the end, the end!”

Unfortunately this film failed to find much of an audience when it originally released and was panned by critics at the time. But time has been favorable to it and a reexamination of it shows that it is actually a very well made farce, designed to string audiences along for a ridiculous ride filled with humor and oddities. From the first moments we see Peterson, Julius and Ravello walking with sole focus through Italy (Gwendolen announces they must be desperate men as none of them looked at her legs when passing by), we get the tone of this film. John Huston strikes that tone perfectly throughout. It failed to impress critics back in 1953 and audiences didn’t flock to it either. Since then, Bogart fans and John Huston fans have discovered it and breathed new life into what could have been a forgotten film. We are all the more fortunate for it as it is a wonderful film well worth the viewing.