Beat the Devil (1953)

Beat the Devil is a British-American-Italian comedy thriller film first released in 1953, directed by John Huston.  The film is based on a novel by James Helvick and stars Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida, Robert Morley and Peter Lorre.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


Billy Dannreuther and his wife Maria are on their way to make their fortune in Africa, but are held up in an Italian port whilst their steamboat undergoes some repair work.  Here, they meet an eccentric English couple, Harry and Gwendolen Chelm, and a strange foursome led by a man named Peterson.  It gradually becomes apparent that they all have one thing in common – to secure the rights to land that is reputed to be rich in uranium ore.  The question is – which of them will get there first...

Beat the Devil is a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek yet totally bizarre concoction of screwball comedy and film noir adventure thriller, which manages to be irresistibly funny in spite of a plot that is childishly absurd and at times unfathomable.  Director John Huston intended it to be a spoof of his earlier noir films, particularly The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), and he succeeded admirably.  

The film’s production was problematic, with Huston working under a tight time constraint and writer Truman Capote busy churning out pages of screenplay whilst the film was in the process of being shot.  Indeed, some of the dialogue is improvised, which adds a certain raw realism to some scenes.  The humour is often so subtle that the viewer is occasionally wrong-footed into thinking this is a straight film noir, but then a sudden burst of slapstick quickly reminds us that it really is a comedy.  

Beat the Devil has an extraordinary cast – possibly the most impressive cast line up of any of Huston’s film.  There is Humphrey Bogart subtly parodying his own classic film noir persona, Gina Lollobrigida showing a surprising aptitude for comedy, Robert Morley and Peter Lorre making an effective double act as two comical gangster-types (an obvious parody of the Greenstreet-Lorre pairing in The Maltese Falcon), and Jennifer Jones and Edward Underdown as the quintessentially English upper crust couple who are anything but.

The film was ill-received when it was first released, and Bogart loathed it (partly because he was unable to recoup the huge sum of money he sank into it), but it rapidly acquired a cult status and today it enjoys much of the popularity and acclaim of Huston’s other great films.  If you’re going to send up film noir, this is definitely the way to do it.

© James Travers 2008

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