Sadly Over-hyped

Did you people see the same film I saw?

brilliant actors, brilliant editing

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

What a wonderful comedy! In every scene it is evident how the director enjoyed filming it with such formidable actors cutting out such hilarious figures, all excelling each other in eccentric idiosyncracy. It's difficult to say who is best, they are all on top, Jennifer Jones as the flirty young wife, Gina Lollobrigida at her most beautiful and seductive, Robert Morley as the king of fools, Peter Lorre and all the others, and Humphrey Bogart giving probably his heartiest last laugh in all his films. It's a criminal comedy at its best bordering on parody all the way but with great irony and wit - the dialogue is thoroughly enjoyable and thick all the way, and the diction is perfect, even for those who speak with accents. I saw it 50 years ago and had forgotten everything except the car ride, the centerpiece of the comedy, and least of all did I remember that it was so hilariously funny. The only serious figure enters the last, and he has very little to say under the circumstances. This must be John Huston's funniest film.

Various crooks, smugglers, con men and adventurers are trying to go to Africa to buy a new valuable material called Uranium. Peterson (Robert Morley), Julius O'Hara (Peter Lorre), the Dannreuthers (Humphrey Bogart, Gina Lollobrigida) and others are stuck in Italy as they wait for their ship to be repaired. Mrs. Gwendolen Chelm (Jennifer Jones) is fascinated with the group as she travels with her husband.Truman Capote is injecting this with lots of snappy rapid-fire dialog. John Huston is trying to shoot the idyllic location with lots of camera work. However this movie just lack a cohesive drive. The characters are all eccentric. There is a rambling quality to this. The story of this ragtag group wasting time at this Mediterranean port isn't that compelling or exciting. The movie feels like on hold for far too long. It feels like a lot of A-list talents playing around without much of a goal.

Just desserts are dished out with glee in this 'crime drama'. Each character is built up to be disliked enough that when the hammer comes down on them, the result are hilarious. No character ever rises above 'amoral' and most are just downright sleazy, so when each little plot is foiled, it's just more icing on this cake of a movie. The supposed main plot of the movie is vague, and takes a back seat to the characters who slowly sink in the quicksand of their behavior throughout the movie. Humphrey Bogart plays the 'arranger' for a quartet of the most inept criminals in movie history. How they got together, no one knows. What they did before: who cares? What their brilliant caper is? Something about uranium and Africa I think. None of that matters. What matters is the expressions on their faces as one by one their ideas fail, their schemes implode, their Machiavellian machinations collide like bumper cars at the amusement park. They discuss murder, robbery, infidelity with banter lighter than air. Each of the actors plays their parts perfectly straight, one has to wonder if any of them were clued in on this prank noir. This is John Huston to the hilt, no holds barred, no character flaw left unexploited. A must see for any Huston fan. People that take their movies too seriously, may not 'get it', so your mileage may vary.

"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.