Beat The Devil
Just a couple housekeeping reviews before my review of “W” later this weekend!
1953, England
Director: John Huston
Screenplay: Huston, Truman Capote
Story: James Helvick (novel)
Beat The Devil is a John Huston-Humphrey Bogart collaboration that defies all genres. Its tone is somewhat humorous, as established by the first exchange of dialogue (in which a woman voices her distrust of passing men because they didn’t bother to check out her legs). Though there are a couple good laughs, they are buried by a meandering, extremely weak plot that takes us places and shows us events without accomplishing anything interesting. There’s sort of a nihilistic flavor here, with the end in particular making light of the characters’ dalliances.
Ultimately, it’s a film that fails to find itself. For one, too much screen time is given to the childish Gwendolen Chelm (Jennifer Jones), who is a microcosm of the film’s nonsensical bent. She asks the sort of pointed questions you might expect from a six-year-old, and tries to cheat on her husband without the slightest hint of weighing the consequences. Her irreverence is quickly tiring, and I started to wonder why Bogart’s typically cynical character would put up with her. Bogart, for his part, never seems to quite belong. For a guy who admits he’s obsessed with money, he does not go to great lengths to secure it, and his motivations are indecipherable. It’s consistent with Bogart’s actual approach to the film, which was complete apathy (he later said of the movie that “only phonies like it.”)
The problem, indeed, is that no one really seems to care about much of anything. There’s uranium in Africa, somewhere, but except perhaps for Robert Morley’s character, no one is particularly determined to claim it. There’s a hundred different digressions in the course of the story…a car falls off a cliff, a fight takes place in a bar, a ship runs aground. That might sound funny, but really it’s just plodding and random (though the car is good). The best saving grace to Beat The Devil is the rare gem or two of dialogue, including a famous piece on the nature of time.
Style: 4
Beat The Devil had poor production values, and indeed feels rather rushed; Bogart, for example, might have needed a few more takes in some scenes. Though the imagery and presentation is largely unremarkable I did enjoy the diverse phenotypes of the four antagonists.
Substance: 5
What do you do with a movie that has a few very clever lines and funny moments but buries them in a mess of unmotivated characters and pointless plot developments? If you’re me, you argue they all roughly cancel out and slap an average score on it.
Overall: 5
Beat The Devil has something of a polarizing effect on film fans, so I’m going to split the difference here. I love some of the lines, but not enough to justify such a listless plot (the scenes in the boat are particularly overlong). If you’re a diehard Bogart or Huston fan it might be worth a look…though seeing as it’s public domain, don’t pay a whole lot.
