Beat the Devil **** (1953, Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida, Robert Morley, Peter Lorre, Bernard Lee) – Classic Movie Review 2,664

John Huston’s quirky and likable 1953 comedy action adventure classic film Beat the Devil stars Humphrey Bogart as Billy Dannreuther, the go-between for a gang of uranium racketeers who want to exploit land in Africa.

Director John Huston’s quirky and likable 1953 comedy action adventure classic Beat the Devil stars Humphrey Bogart as Billy Dannreuther, the go-between for a gang of uranium racketeers who want to exploit land in Africa.

In an Italian port, he and his wife Maria (Gina Lollobrigida) get mixed up with a seemingly innocent English married couple, Mrs Gwendolen Chelm (Jennifer Jones) and Harry Chelm (Edward Underdown), apparently targets for a property swindle.

Huston, writing the screenplay with Truman Capote based on a novel by British journalist Claud Cockburn (publishing under the pseudonym as James Helvick), sends up the spy thriller with smoothly amusing results. That is thanks mainly to their delicious writing and the hilarious performances from Peter Lorre as Julius O’Hara and Robert Morley as Peterson, plus fine work from Lollobrigida and Underdown.

The screenplay was being written on a day-to-day basis as the film was being shot. It concerns the adventures of a motley crew of swindlers and ne’er-do-wells trying to lay claim to land rich in uranium deposits in Kenya as they wait in the small Italian port to travel aboard an ill-fated tramp steamer en route to Mombasa.

There is an amateur atmosphere of professionals enjoying a day off that is slack but is also entirely endearing and has entertaining results. But most Fifties film-goers didn’t much care for its clever-clever air of over-smartness. And nor did an uncomfortable-seeming Bogart, who felt he had never been let into the joke properly, and as a result does not give one of his best performances.

The joke is that the film is a parody of Huston and Bogart’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) and films of the same genre, Casablanca and Notorious among them. Even later, Bogart never came to like the movie, perhaps also because he lost a good deal of his own money bankrolling it, and said: ‘Only phonies like it.’

Also in the cast are Ivor Barnard, Bernard Lee, Marco Tulli, Giulio Donnini, Saro Urzì, Aldo Silvani, Juan de Landa and Mario Perrone.

Gina Lollobrigida was born on July 4 1927 in Subiaco, Italy, destined to be called ‘The Most Beautiful Woman in the World’. She celebrated her 90th birthday on July 4 2017. She died in Rome on 16 January 2023, at the age of 95.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2,664

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