While looking around for interesting old movies, I found a 1953 movie I had never heard of. But this wasn’t just any old movie. It starred Humphrey Bogart and Gina Lollobrigida. And as I looked further, it also had Peter Lorre in it. And it was directed by John Huston. And it was written by Huston and Truman Capote. This sounds like the perfect pedigree for a great classic movie.
So why has no one ever heard of it?
The movie is called Beat the Devil and it’s described as an “adventure comedy” film which was intended to be a parody of the Maltese Falcon. Roger Ebert said it was the first “camp film” in history. It flopped at the box office and one investor (Bogart) was disappointed in it—but some critics swooned over it.
The backstory is that this film was made in a hurry by some big names who were mostly drunk and out to have fun. Bogart later on said of the film, “Only phonies like it.” I think he meant that people were supposed to like Beat the Devil, but nobody really liked it. That is a little harsh but there is some truth to it. The movie is off kilter. The dialog is odd, but sometimes funny, and although there is not much of a plot, you still always know sort of what’s going on.
The “macguffin” is a term coined by Alfred Hitchcock for a cinematic plot device in a movie. You can base an entire movie on a macguffin, but at the end of the film, the macguffin is not important at all. You may watch the whole movie and never find out what the macguffin actually is. In the Maltese Falcon, the dark little statue of the bird is the macguffin. The characters are all plotting and scheming to get their hands on the little avian beast but the viewer never knows (or cares) why. Other macguffins are the brief case in Pulp Fiction or the “government secrets” in North by Northwest or the diamond owned by Rose in Titanic.
Everything in Beat the Devil is a macguffin.
The first macguffin is the main point of the story: a band of crooks are all trying to get to British East Africa to acquire some land that allegedly has uranium. It’s hard to know if the crooks are working together or not, in fact, it’s not immediately apparent if they even know each other when the film opens. But they get to know each other because when the film opens, they’re stranded in some port town in Italy waiting for repairs to be made to their ship that will take them to Africa.
All kinds of preposterous things happen. Although the Bogart character in the film is married to the Gina Lollobrigida character, many of the characters in the movie hook up with people they’re not married to, but it is not clear if they’re trying to spy on each other or they are just serially promiscuous. I found it weird that Bogart’s character is married to an extremely sexy woman who lolls around in the most of the film in low-cut outfits, but he’s busy chasing another woman. But the plot is so ambiguous—are these really affairs or are they spying on each other? Nobody knows who is working with whom.
There is a weird car chase and accident. One of the characters get sick and takes to his bed. At some point they manage to get on the boat, and the ship’s captain is always drunk. Then the boat inexplicably sinks. One of the characters lies like Kamala Harris; she tells obvious lies that everyone knows are lies but no one cares. After being saved in a life raft, the group of misfits arrive at some place in Africa and are quickly captured by the local authorities.
The characters are often dressed in inappropriate outfits, like suits in the desert. One of the ladies wears evening gowns in every scene even though they’re on a rust-bucket of a boat and later captured in Africa. (It had a little bit of that “Gilligan’s Island” vibe.) And if you’re looking for resolution, well, this film has one—the plot does get resolved—but it’s as preposterous as the rest of the film.
If you try to watch the movie as a movie, you’ll be disappointed. But if you realize it’s just a joke, it is tolerable to the point of being interesting. Roger Ebert once wrote that this movie has “effortless charm.” I’m not sure I agree, but if you see it with the right frame of mind, some parts of it are pretty funny. For instance, Peter Lorre plays a character named O’Hara although he speaks with his famous German accent. He explains this by stating enigmatically, “There are a lot of O’Haras in Chile.” If that sort of thing tickles you, you’ll laugh a lot at this movie. (That remark does not tie back in to any plot point.)
Some minor trivia. Humphrey Bogart was in a car wreck during the filming of Beat the Devil and lost some teeth, which made it difficult for him to talk at all and he no longer sounded like Bogie. So his pal Peter Sellers dubbed some of his lines.
The director John Huston suffered a fall from a cliff while they were on location. It is reported he was drunk at the time. And Truman Capote, barely 30 years old, was already eccentric (he wasn’t the kind of person who got famous and then eccentric—he was always eccentric) and cranked out pages of script day by day as the film went along. But he and Huston allowed the actors to make up a lot of their dialog as well. The production schedule was chaotic and some of the actors complained that before each day’s work they did not understand their lines or the plot of the movie. Indeed.
One last note: the “clapper boy” on the film (the one who holds up the slate and snaps it closed before each shot) on this film was Stephen Sondheim.
You can probably find this film anywhere since its copyright expired years ago and was never renewed. However, in 2016, the film was restored and the restored version is under copyright. Allegedly, the restoration involves only about four minutes that were cut from the original film and were restored in this 2016 version.
Beat the Devil is an acquired taste, but one I rather came to like. I went back and watched it again.