Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
With Humphrey Bogart in front of the camera, here as Billy Dannreuther, a formerly rich man now working well beneath his station, and John Huston behind it, and a script co-authored by Truman Capote, there’s surely no way that Beat the Devil could go wrong. Is there? Well, I suppose the fact that, be honest, you’ve never heard of it before now, and that apparently the studios did not think it worth renewing the copyright on, maybe something did go wrong.
At any rate Dannreuther is part of a loose confederation of other Huston regulars stuck in an Italian port waiting for the departure of the SS Nyanga, their ride to British East Africa where they hope to strike it rich buying land laden with uranium. Again, further support for the Huston “career as travel expenses” theory. His uneasy bedfellows are Robert Morley’s Peterson, Peter Lorre’s Julius O’Hara, Ivor Barnard’s Major Jack Ross and Marco Tulli’s Ravello, all fine character actors rather underserved with characters of their own, so must make do with carrying theirs over from previous films.
Also waiting are Dannreuther’s wife Maria, Gina Lollobrigida, and an English couple, Harry and Gwendolen Chelm, Edward Underdown and Jennifer Jones, who rather give the impression of being part of the landed gentry, although as you might imagine in this sort of thing, no-one is quite what they seem. The four seem to get on quite well, indeed Billy soon starts an affair with Gwendolen at more or less the same time that Maria and Harry do.
After a strangely pointless diversion involving a car crash and the others mistakenly thinking Billy and Peterson are dead, the ship is finally ready for departure however in the constrained confines of the cabins tensions rise and tempers fray, particularly after Harry finds out and threatens to expose the scheme. I’m not sure how much of a scandal that would really be, seeing as it appears to be “to legally buy some land with money”, but at any rate its enough for Peterson to want Harry killed, although it appears the dilapidated boat wants them all dead, causing them to abandon ship, wash ashore and wind up in an Arab jail as things fall further apart.
Despite the undoubted bona fides of the writing team for this, let’s politely say that the story is not the strongest card in Beat the Devil‘s deck. Thankfully, given the nature of this beast, it just needs to be enough to hang a loose parody and some solid gags from. Although it hasn’t managed to do that last part, which is maybe the biggest problem it has.
There’s some positives in here to be sure, mainly a talented ensemble cast that, although wildly underserved by the script, have enough charisma to keep this engaging enough to forgive the rather broadly sketched characters and gags, and while watching it I didn’t find it boring or insulting. However when writing about it I’m not sure there’s all that much in here I’d want to praise, or indeed recommend. It’s by no means awful, but even if it’s freely available on archive.org, I’m not sure it’s really worth your time for all but the Huston or Bogart completionists.