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BEAT THE DEVIL
1953
Director
John Huston
Starring
Humphrey Bogart
Jennifer Jones
Gina Lollobrigida
Runtime
94 minutes
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"The weirdest movie Humphrey Bogart ever made." - Michael Phillips
The star lineup sparkles in this witty, lighthearted tale of a gang of international schemers and cutthroats trying to—well, what they’re trying to do is all but irrelevant. John Huston throws his picture together like a party, for a droll ‘thriller’ that yields off-kilter comic riches. It’s Bogart, Robert Morley, Peter Lorre and Gina Lollobrigida, plus Jennifer Jones as we’ve not seen her before or since. Truman Capote’s sly, unbeatably hip dialogue—totally written on the fly celebrates the underhanded ambitions of greedy fools everywhere.
Huston, Bogart, and Capote had (way too much) fun making BEAT THE DEVIL despite multiple disasters—which included Huston’s drunken fall off a cliff and an auto accident that shattered Bogart’s bridgework—and it shows. Like Orson Welles' THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI a few years earlier, BEAT THE DEVIL bent and stretched audience expectations to the snapping point. This is both why it was firmly rejected in its own time and why it works so weirdly well today. It’s a uniquely punch-drunk champion in the annals of rogue cinema
"BEAT THE DEVIL is the sort of eccentric, one-of-a-kind film that’s a natural candidate for cult status, and it has more to recommend it than a lot of other such films, especially now that it’s come back as its original, shaggy self in a transformative restoration that removes superfluous narration and restores unjust cuts." - Farran Smith Nehme
The star lineup sparkles in this witty, lighthearted tale of a gang of international schemers and cutthroats trying to—well, what they’re trying to do is all but irrelevant. John Huston throws his picture together like a party, for a droll ‘thriller’ that yields off-kilter comic riches. It’s Bogart, Robert Morley, Peter Lorre and Gina Lollobrigida, plus Jennifer Jones as we’ve not seen her before or since. Truman Capote’s sly, unbeatably hip dialogue—totally written on the fly celebrates the underhanded ambitions of greedy fools everywhere.
Huston, Bogart, and Capote had (way too much) fun making BEAT THE DEVIL despite multiple disasters—which included Huston’s drunken fall off a cliff and an auto accident that shattered Bogart’s bridgework—and it shows. Like Orson Welles' THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI a few years earlier, BEAT THE DEVIL bent and stretched audience expectations to the snapping point. This is both why it was firmly rejected in its own time and why it works so weirdly well today. It’s a uniquely punch-drunk champion in the annals of rogue cinema
"BEAT THE DEVIL is the sort of eccentric, one-of-a-kind film that’s a natural candidate for cult status, and it has more to recommend it than a lot of other such films, especially now that it’s come back as its original, shaggy self in a transformative restoration that removes superfluous narration and restores unjust cuts." - Farran Smith Nehme