Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Beat him up, 31 Aug 2006
You'd think that "Beat the Devil" would be far better known than it is, since it was one of the last movies that Humphrey Bogart did before his untimely death. Maybe that's because Bacall wasn't in it, or maybe it was just too quirky for the masses -- a funny, wry noir-satire, with a gang of rather inept criminals.
Billy Dannreuther (Bogart) is part of a motley group planning to go to Africa, where a friend can help them illegally claim uranium. But trouble arrives: stuffy Harry Chelm (Edward Underdown) and his very imaginative wife Gwen (Jennifer Jones) arrive, and soon they're flirting with Billy and his sensual wife Maria (Gina Lollabrigida).
Even worse, Gwen's "exaggeration" habit is making the gang distrust Billy, thinking that he's withholding information from them. He isn't, of course. But all the personal plots and distrust come to a boil when everyone boards the ship, and Harry reveals that he knows everything about their uranium plot. Now Billy has to save himself and his friends, without Harry being bumped off...
"Beat the Devil" is an all-around satire -- it mocks grabby criminals, pathological liars, stodgy Brits, romance movies, crime capers, and even second-rate boats ("Of course, the captain is drunk!"). In fact, there's very little about this movie that doesn't poke fun at itself, or at the movies of the time.
And since it was adapted by John Huston and Truman Capote, you know that it's being witty as it makes fun. It languidly builds up in a sunny, ruined city where people plot and flirt, and then starts to boil when they get on board the boat. But even engine failures manage to be entertaining when Harry wrecks the oil pump while trying to fix it.
The cast is skilled in that under-the-radar way: Bogart plays a slightly more offbeat version of his noir characters, and Jennifer Jones is hilarious as the ditzy, chattery English girl. Peter Lorre and Robert Morley are also quite good as Bogie's pals, and Underdown plays the insensitive, straight-arrow dunce perfectly. You'll constantly want to smack him.
Though not as respected as it deserves, "Beat the Devil" is a little gem of a Bogart movie, with a witty, satirical script and lots of wild twists. Definitely a keeper.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Cancer, 18 Aug 2008
The plot, if you can call it that, concerned a group of six stranded adventurers in an Italian port whose plan is to buy up some East African land that supposedly contains uranium... Double-crossing quickly becomes the name of the game as Bogart (clearly suffering from the ravages of the cancer that killed him) and his fellow conspirators (Peter Lorre et al) outdo each other in inspired crazy way...
Bogart, trying desperately to maintain his composure, delivered such priceless lines as: 'I'm only in on this because the doctor told me I needed plenty of money. Without money I become dull, listless, and have trouble with my complexion." But his lines weren't the only offbeat ones... In a room where he's being questioned after being captured, while a firing squad goes about its routine work outside, he is asked straight-faced, "Now tell me, do you really know Rita Hayworth?"
The film is one of those rare items that viewers either seem to love or hate, no middle ground accepted... and declared that only the "phonies" thought it was really funny... Many reviewers thought the whole thing was a tasteless joke and decried the waste of time, talent, and money...
In any case, Bogart gave an immensely satisfying performance in his tongue-in-cheek role and the film itself has now become a regular attraction in Bogart film retrospectives... It is also an excellent example of how much Bogart had matured as an actor, since it is not easy to overcome apparently inept material and still give a performance with some meaning and substance...
Bee Clarke. 6/10.
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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Justly Obscure, 28 Feb 2008
Justly obscure is this black and white film directed by John Huston and using the group of famous actors so often pitted against each other in some of the noirs of the late 1930's, 1940's and onwards: Bogart, Sidney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre; Robert Morley too and (stunningly) Gina Lollobrigida. Yet even their combined efforts cannot really bring to more than flickering life this tale of intrigue and mock-conspiracy in Italy and on the high seas.
To my way of thinking, the problem is that they are unsure whether to play the film for laughs as a comedy-thriller, or to try to make it a real film noir. The story, about uranium smuggling, is taken from the eponymous book, a high seller in its day, by the Comintern agent and general wandering Communist sympathizer Claud Cockburn, who, I believe, scripted the film, having met Huston while he was filming something else in Eire, where Cockburn and his wife had moved after WW2.
The locations are interesting: the Italian Adriatic lovely even in b&w and the towns not boring: I especially liked what I think was Algiers. Almost an historical document by now, I should think, rather like Nuremburg in the Riefenstahl film "Triumph of the Will".
One flaw for me was the number of scenes involving extremely noisy groups of "Mediterraneans" of various types. One supposes that Cockburn or Huston thought that such crowd scenes would be amusing, in perhaps, the manner of the Irish peasantry featured in the books of "The Irish RM" (later most successfully filmed for British TV). Here, the ploy does not work and the scenes are just noisily tiresome. The print is not clear in either visual or audio, another factor lessening enjoyment.
In the end, I have to confess I just wanted it to end and could not have cared less about the ending.
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