“What have we got to worry about? We’re only adrift in an open sea with a drunken captain and an engine that’s liable to explode at any moment.”
“Perfectly ordinary situation. Happens every day.”
Humphrey Bogart was by all accounts no fan of
Beat the Devil, dismissing its admirers because "only phonies think it's funny." But that was hardly surprising since he lost several teeth in a car accident during the shoot that director John Huston apparently found hysterically funny, reportedly necessitating a then-little known Peter Sellers dubbing some of his dialogue, and then lost most of the $400,000 he invested in it through his production company when it flopped. The latter isn’t entirely surprising when the 50s audiences lured in by a reunion of The Maltese Falcon’s Huston, Bogart and Peter Lorre with Robert Morley standing in for Sidney Greenstreet that the posters (see above) sold as a two-fisted romantic adventure found instead a flippant smart Alek spoof with in-jokes that many probably didn’t catch, like Bernard Lee’s character being named after associate producer (and future director of The Innocents) Jack Clayton. Like It’s a Wonderful Life it eventually found its second life after appearing to fall into the Public Domain and becoming a staple of local TV stations and cheap video labels, albeit usually in the re-edited and censored version released in the US, but it’s fair to say that in any form it’s a divisive film that audiences either love or hate.
This time the stuff that dreams are made of are uranium deposits in Mombassa that everyone wants to exploit behind the British government’s back – if only they could actually get there. Stuck in a small Italian port are a motley bunch of thoroughly undesirables calling themselves The Committee – Bogart’s ‘middle-aged roustabout’ who may or may not have once been a man of substance (
“It’s not that he means to break his word, he just forgets that he’s given it”), Morley’s domineering fitness-obsessed moneyman (
“You mean to say there are parts of the Dark Continent where you won’t be received like the Prodigal Son?”), the surprisingly less than prominently billed Lorre’s German called O’Hara (
“What’s our wide-eyed Irish leprechaun doing outside my door?”), Ivor Bernard’s rodentially diminutive and very intense ex-British army psychopath (
“Say what you want to about Hitler, he had his points”) and Marco Tulli’s sad sack Italian (
“I’m going upstairs and read my Bible”), with Bogie’s Anglophile ‘wife’ Lollabrigida (
“She seems to have a very real feeling for English country life”) adding a touch of glamour.
While they’re waiting for the drunken captain of their ship to get round to repairing the engine, two more passengers drift into their orbit and sow confusion, Jennifer Jones’ flaky unqualified liar with no control of her romantic fantasies who begins every whopper with the words “In point of fact” (
“Let’s just say she uses her imagination rather than her memory”) and her puffed-up ex-Royal Marine and ‘ruddy refugee from Earl’s Court’ husband Edward Underdown (
“You need any friends you can get. The only thing standing between you and a watery grave is your wits, and that’s not my idea of adequate protection”).
Along the way Jones imagines herself in love with Bogart (and imagines much more, none of it helpful, remotely credible or conducive to her husband’s health), Lollabrigida half-heartedly imagines Underdown is her ticket to the stately homes and beautiful lawns she dreams of and the Committee don’t know what to imagine from one moment to the next but are so determined not to be outwitted by interlopers that they end up not quite thwarting but certainly slightly derailing their plans on a regular basis instead. It’s the kind of film that talks fast and often wittily, never tells the truth and is full of relentless activity and plotting that constantly goes nowhere as everyone circles everyone else with a view to the main chance and which leaves some viewers as frustrated as its main characters while amusing and delighting those on its wavelength. Even the latter might find some irritants – for me it’s Jones’ thoroughly committed turn as the kind of fantasist who should be committed but gets a free pass because she’s just another eccentric in a film full of them even though she’s probably far more irritating and resistible than she’s meant to be – but there’s too much to compensate, from the colourful supporting cast (special mention to Mario Perrone’s blithe purser cheerfully announcing each new disaster) to its gleeful celebration of corruption and moral turpitude.
Unlike the many bootleg DVD releases over the years that use the re-edited US version with some narration from Bogart, Twilight Time’s Region A-locked Bluray is the original UK version, uncensored, un-narrated and in completely chronological order, and beautifully restored despite Columbia only having access to 60% of the original negative – indeed, it’s done so well you can’t tell which parts are from the negative and which from a fine grain UK print. With excellent definition and contrast it looks like it could have been shot yesterday, or at least if people as good at their job as Oswald Morris still regularly shot in black and white. It’s hard to imagine the film ever looking better on home video.
Along with an audio commentary by Lem Dobbs, Julie Kirgo and Nick Redman and a trailer for the restored version’s 2016 reissue, the disc also includes
Alexander Cockburn Beat the Devil, a 22-minute interview with the son of the author Claud Cockburn, who wrote the novel under the pseudonym (one of many) James Helvick because he was listed as one of the 260 most dangerous communists in the world by a Senate Committee and had been under constant surveillance by British Intelligence since 1934. It’s a somewhat unfocused affair at times, but there’s plenty of interesting information – Cockburn and his wife conspired to leave copies all around the house of a family friend when Huston was visiting in the hope he’d read it, which worked so well that the director made lengthy (and then hideously expensive) trans-Atlantic phone calls to Bogart to read him the novel and persuade him to buy the film rights – and goes to some lengths to dispel Truman Capote’s claims to have written the whole thing (as well as Huston’s unmentioned claims they made up the plot as they went along) when Cockburn Sr., Anthony Veiller and Peter Viertel had all written the earlier drafts by comparing sections of the film to their verbatim parts of the novel that reveal that many of the bon mots Capote took the credit for were simply transcribed rather than created by him.
All in all a very pleasing presentation of a film that looked condemned to third and fourth generation dupe purgatory: it smokes, it drinks, it philosophises….
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