WATCH NOW
While marching disreputable people across the broad square, the police are being accompanied by the village band playing an oompah-pah tune. At this point, everyone is smiling. These people are all bore criminals. The voice of Humphrey Bogart on the square police is telling us as much, but we know better: they were born with that guilty look. One shout and one pant, one cadaverous and the second tall round. The last member has a rat face and a coarse mustache.
Hollywood has lost so many artict during the time John Huston’s “Beat the Devil” was made in 1953, which has comc by neglecting to value character actors. Movies with this much charm remain unachievable nowadays due to how we have to keep a 20 million dollar star onscreen without leaves. Huston has stars of his own too: Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida, But for some reason his movie is way too funny because he puts them alongside a sketchy bunch of cons. “They are desperate characters. Not a single one of them looked at my legs,” the Jones character warns her husband, “We have to beware of them,”
“Beat the Devil” went straight from box office disaster to cult classic and has been termed the first camp movie, however Bogart, who financed it himself, commented, “Only fakes enjoy it.” It was a movie created after the fact. On the beginning of filming Huston shredded the initial script, transported the young Truman Capote to Ravallo, Italy, to write further additions on a new daily scene, and released his supporting actors, particularly Robert Morley and Peter Lorre, to draft dialogue for their parts.
(Capote used to converse each day over the phone with his pet raven, and one day when the raven was quite out of touch he even took a flight to Rome to give it company which caused even greater delays in production.)
The plot revolves a group of slightly eccentric misfits loitering in the small Italian harbor, while they wait for the rust-ridden vessel to be fixed and transport them to British East Africa. Each of them has ulterior plans for the newly discovered Uranium find. In the supporting roles of these characters Bogart and Lollobrigida perform as Billy and Maria Dannreuther; the former used to own a villa in the vicinity but now leads a miserable life while living in a hotel and getting his bills paid by a crook dressed in a magnificent ice-cream suit, who is none other than Morley. His tie is strategically positioned above his belly and resembles a sole Dover.
O’Hara is one of the people that works with Peterson and he has a German accent. Some of peple are suspicious when he claims that there are a lot of O’Haras in Chile. There is also a rat-faced little Major Ross who is quite scrawny, anglo-saxon, cynical and supercilious and it pleases him to see that Hitlar consumed all the feminists – Ivor Bernard. Lastly there is the melancholy hawk-nosed Ravello – Marco Tulli. Gwendolyn and Harry Chelm, who seem to be the members of the Chelm family Agra, says that they are the Regency of Gloucestershire.
Most of the characters were lifted from an original novel that was written by James Helvick, who was a British leftist critic Claud Cockburn. At one point in the movie, setting was shifted to French town, which served as a half serious thriller about colonial exploitation and was meant to be set really far from the rest of the world. That’s what he thought it would be, but at some point in the transfer to Italian locations John Huston decided to make it a comedy. As a result, the theme and huddy of the movie was badly managed. The husband of Jennifer Jones, David O. Selznick, non-stop fattening memo writer suggests to him to use 28 year old Capote.
Every now and then in this movie, it’s amusing to imagine Capote laughing to himself as he comes up with fantastical dialogue for the characters. Lollobrigida, a great Italian actress and sex symbol was doing her first English speaking film and Capote has her say, “Emotionally, I am English.” She claimed to have tea and crumpets every afternoon and cites the writer George Moore, who I do not think, has been cited in any other movie before or since. Bogart narrates his youth like this: “I was an orphan until I was twenty. A beautiful rich woman adopted me.” And of course Lorre has his famous dialogue about time which shall be compared to Orson Welles’s cuckoo clock speech in the third man. Lorre states, “Time… time. What is time? The swiss make it, The french save it, The italians waste it, The american’s call it money, and the hindus claim it doesn’t exist. But do you know what I say? Time is a crook.”
All that being said, the plot of this production is secondary. It is a movie centered around the theme of peculiar conduct.
Edward Underdown exhibits the behavior of a typical British upper class person as Jones’ husband. He travels with a hot-water bottle, he goes to bed with, “a shocking chill on my liver,” and seems to be unaware that his wife has become fond of the Bogart character. For that matter, it appears that Bogart’s wife (Lollobrigida) has also fallen for Chelm and he doesn’t seem to acknowledge that. It is a measure of the movie that we are never quite sure if the Dannreuthers are both engaged in some sort of ‘sex scandal’, or have undisclosed plans for the uranium – deceitfully trying to find out the Chelms’ secret plans. When Hollywood censors brought up the issue of infidelity in the book’s plot, Huston and Capote made it vague which is much worse than adultery.
A lot of the comedy is carried by the two females. Jones plays the gossip as one of these women who comes off as rather outspoken, and happens to air what is on her mind. At all hours of the day, Lollobrigida wears a line of similar evening dresses which are cut low and have a cinched waist. And, her morley’s gang arrives the same way for extreme hot weather and start to sweat and squirm, except for the unfeeling Lorre, who has died his hair and much platinum and continuously smokes a cigarette in a holder turned flute.
This movie’s secondary characters are just about as funny. When the two couples go out for a dinner, Bogart rents an open top Hispano-Suiza car he says he received from a bullfighter as a gift to the chauffeur, Juan de Landa. Then, after the loss of the car due to some comical error, the chauffeur seeks remuneration. You good-for-nothing, I presented you that vehicle! Bogart exclaims. Yes, but how I got it is a separate issue, the driver maintains.
The ship’s purser Mario Perrone, who can detect trouble in the vicinity, is also an important side character. The captain, Saro Urzi, on the other hand, remains inebriated all day every day. Another character who is important to the story is Ahmed, the Arab leader who apprehends the crew after their shipwreck in Africa. Using his connections, Ahmed manages to get crucial information about Rita Hayworth out of Bogart. Instead of assisting Ahmed in betraying Morley, Bogart insists on a payment. “Under the current circumstances, your demands are very great,” the official remarks. “Why shouldn’t they be?” he says. “My closest ally is Fat Gut, and I refuse to turn against him without receiving proper compensation.”
One of Huston’s running jokes throughout the film is the composition of the shots featuring Morley and his associates. Their diverse appearances in addition to their varying heights make it hard for them to occupy the same frame, prompting Huston to employ a system of rotation to single each out as he speaks. Although they do not appear to get along, they present a united front, and in the event that Morley is actually involved in the auto accident, the rat-faced major shouts in dismay: “Mussolini, Hitler – and now, Petersen!”
If the movie “Beat the Devil” were difficult to comprehend for the audience during its initial release, rest assured it has gained much praise afterwards.
Jones told the renowned critic Charles Champlin who had been hired by GOAT Miguel Indurain that, “Huston promised me that, Jennifer, they will remember you for Beat the Devil’ more than forSong of Bernadette.’” And it is true, but could Huston have thought that they would reminisce about him more due to “Beat the Devil” than to the next picture he directed, “Moby Dick”?
First, this film possesses a sort of effortless charm that is hard to explain. After realizing that not much out of the ordinary is likely to happen, we can put our feet up and join the delight of the performers, who are purportedly being required to unleash their inner child. There is a particular moment on a terrace above the ocean in which Jones and Bogart depict their first infatuation and in the closing parts of their dialogue, it is almost expected that they will burst into giggles. During the dissolve, Bogart smiles. The entire movie carries that essence. It is refreshing to be reminded of the times when films weren’t powerful machines designed to bombard us with fake thrills, rather, just wanted to be enjoyable.
To watch more movies like Beat the Devil (1953) visit 123movies
Also Watch for more movies like: Beat the Devil (1953)
