Hahaha This movie is such a hoot. The story behind the movie is almost as entertaining as the movie itself. Beat the Devil - directed by John Huston. Starring Bogart, Peter Lorre, Gina Lollobrigida, Jennifer Jones. Truman Capote, after the start of filming, was called in to script-doctor ... and through his help, turned this standardized fare into a magical bizarre nonsensical comedy (you can completely feel his influence in the role Jennifer Jones played - a kind of Holly Golightly). This was not the movie that everybody signed up to play ... Capote hijacked the whole thing - but it's probably best that he did. The movie is humorous, really entertaining, and makes absolutely no sense if you think about it for more than 5 minutes. See it, if you haven't. It's a lot of fun!
Beat the Devil 1954
"The formula of Beat the Devil," its director, John Huston, once remarked, "is that everyone is slightly absurd." The plot of the picture was unknown to the cast, but presumably known to Huston and his co-writer Truman Capote; however, Capote later remarked that he had "a suspicion that John wasn't clear about it." Commercially speaking, the movie courted -- and achieved -- disaster. According to most accounts, Capote wrote the script as they went along (reading it aloud to the cast each morning, Robert Morley says), and Huston didn't show any signs of anxiety. This improvisation was not necessarily an actor's delight, and Humphrey Bogart, who looks rather bewildered through much of it, as if he hadn't been let in on the joke, said, "Only the phonies think it's funny. It's a mess." Yes, but it may be the funniest mess of all time. It kidded itself, yet it succeeded in some original (and perhaps dangerously marginal) way by finding a style of its own. Bogart and his wife, Gina Lollobrigida, are on a ship bound for British East Africa; their travel companions are a gang of uranium swindlers -- Morley, Peter Lorre, Marco Tulli, and Ivor Barnard. The funniest performer is Jennifer Jones (in a blond wig) as a creative liar; she's married to a bogus British lord (Edward Underdown). Then there's a shipwreck. This straight-faced parody of the international thriller killed off the whole genre. (It also ended the Huston-Bogart working relationship. Bogart had had his own money in the picture.)Posted by sheila
The stories from the set about Truman and ubermacho Huston are so interesting, because you see this manly, charismatic man basically fall in love with Truman's own brand of femme charisma. It's that frisson of focus experienced by curious people everywhere when they encounter something new or different. By the end of the movie they're a gang, Houston, Bogart, Capote, Lorrie, et al. Did they stay friends? Not really. But their collaboration lives on, and in a way, it's a testament to the idea of diversity, the idea that the product from a diverse group of people has the potential to be richer. Capote was more than "diverse" of course - he was also supremely talented, but in many ways it was his sensibilities, his fun and frolic, that were more influential on this movie than his writing talent. He's tinkerbell, sprinkling fairy dust on the caravan, and suddenly the camels are flying.
Posted by: Stevie at May 8, 2005 2:02 PMNobody could have said "Shut up, baby" better then Bogart.
Posted by: Scotter at May 8, 2005 2:14 PMI just absolutely love this movie. Have not seen it in years. Wish someone would put out a restored widescreen version. I do remember that you had to keep complete attention to what was going on or you would become completely lost. Kind of a hard thing to do for this generation who likes special effects over story and dialog.
Posted by: don at May 9, 2005 1:11 AM