Watch Beat the Devil For Free

Best movie of this year hands down!

Truly Dreadful Film

To me, this movie is perfection.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Producers: Humphrey Bogart, James Woolf. A production of Santana Pictures (Los Angeles) and Romulus Films (London). Released in the U.K. by Independent in association with British Lion on 11 January 1954; in Australia by 20th Century-Fox on 18 August 1954; in the U.S.A. by United Artists in March 1954. Running times: 100 minutes (9,000 feet) (U.K.); 93 minutes (premiere engagements in the U.S.A.), 93 minutes (Australia); 82 minutes (general release in the U.S.A.); 89 minutes (U.S. television print distributed by Screen Gems). Copyright in the U.S. by Santana Pictures on 3 March 1954. New York opening at 68 neighborhood theaters: 12 March 1954. Sydney Opening at the Mayfair. SYNOPSIS: Six adventurers are stranded at a small Italian port while their steamer is being repaired. One group is a quartet of international crooks - Petersen, O'Hara, Ross, and Ravello. The other consists of their front-man, an American fortune hunter named Billy Dannreuther, and his wife, Maria, who pass the four scoundrels off as their "business associates." They are bound for British East Africa, ostensibly to sell vacuum cleaners in Kenya, but actually to buy up some public land on a private tip that the place is loaded with uranium. With a passion for secrecy, the four conspirators see danger everywhere, having already murdered one potential blabber in London. NOTES: Unsuccessful on first release in America and England, the movie was later taken up as a cult favorite. But in Australia, the reverse happened. Bogart's popularity ensured that the picture took excellent money (even from audiences who found its story and treatment confusing) right across the board. Later, although film societies made some efforts to impress the corduroy set, they were unsuccessful. Coffee philosophers will always condemn a movie that's popular (unless of course that popularity occurred a generation or two ago.COMMENT: Personally, I thought the African scene where the conspirators were forced to smile one of the funniest in the film. Another memorably comic interlude was the episode with the Hispano-Suiza. The whole film is shot in a stylish and inventive fashion. Bogart is ideally cast and Morley's portrayal is as rich and fruity as a ripe paw-paw. Marco Tulli has made many Italian films, though we believe Beat the Devil and The Monte Carlo Story (1956) are his only English-language appearances. Saro Urzi has been acting in Italian films since 1939. Beat the Devil is his only English-language film to date. Urzi achieved international recognition in 1964 when he starred in Pietro Germi's Sedotta e Abbandonata.

There are times when you look at a movie and you have to say "the devil made them do it." This is one of those cases, as a little known novel- Beat The Devil by James Helvick adapted by a writer Claud Cockburn whose writing is best known as the source of Cabaret, then adapted by Truman Capote and John Huston plus a couple of other writers, and you wind up with something oddly eccentric. Then you give the film a very low budget and film it all in Europe with several fairly well known actors and expect the cast to carry the film. It almost works though I am not sure if the cast or the writers got over paid for this one.The British part of the humor stands out, the tuna can not be put any further into a cheek than it is here. Oddities scream out in galore. Gina Lollobrigida is Bogart's wife, who oddly is not cast as an Italian though she seems very much to be one. Jennifer Jones is married to Edward Underdown who is sickly all the time while she is lying about him being an English Noble type. Both women seem to stray to each others husbands, though neither woman seems into either of their men, except using them for money and status.Bogart is doing business with a group of con men headed by Robert Morley and Peter Lorre, and yet he is performing a con job on them, and balancing the two eccentric ladies in his life. There is a rich texture to the cast, script, and story yet the film is done on the cheap. Look for Bernard Lee, M in the classic Bond films, as Insp. Jack Clayton, trying to make nonsense of this whole thing.The film sort of starts near the end, then goes back to the beginning and sort of fills in the strange world with a lot of the smoke and mirrors. That is what this film is, subtle humor with A List Talent performing on a shoe string budget with famous writing adopting a little known novel into a odder film. It kind of reminds me of Fairly Odd Parents being done live without actual parents while the kids are using crayons to color in a slang dictionary without a printed book to base the meanings on.

Having grown up on those classic black and white films of the 30s and 40s as a child I was fascinated by Humphrey Bogart. Not a great looking lead actor but not horrid either, Bogart was the everyman of the day, a guy like everyone else but who always had an answer. He was a tough guy who could work his way out of any jam, as adept at being the hero as he was the villain. While I had the chance to see many of his films there were a few I never quite seemed to find for one reason or another. BEAT THE DEVIL was one of those films.Made in 1953 BEAT THE DEVIL reteamed Bogart with director John Huston. The duo had performed well together with films like THE MALTESE FALCON, THE TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE and THE African QUEEN so one would expect more success to follow. This wasn't the case as many critics were not fond of this film. After watching it I can understand why. The movie feels like a film out of time, made way before many of the plot elements would become acceptable to audiences.Bogart plays Billy Dannreuther, a wheeler dealer stuck in a small Italian village with his wife Maria (Gina Lollobrigida) as well as several other passengers of a freighter en route to Africa. Billy is the driving force with connections to a local willing to assist in the purchase of a field full of uranium, a piece of land worth millions and held by an unknowing owner. Among the other characters stranded are Billy's backers, Peterson (Robert Morley), Julius O'Hara (Peter Lorre), Ravello (Marco Tulli) and Major Jack Ross (Ivor Barnard), a motley crew at best. None of the partners trust each other let alone Billy.Also on board the ship are an English couple on holiday also headed for Africa, Harry Chelm (Edward Underdown) and his wife Gwendolen (Jennifer Jones). Gwendolen is prone for flights of fancy, guessing who is who and what their stories are in an attempt to raise herself above the boring life she leads. She makes the mistake of going one step further when she finds herself drawn to Billy and falling in love. This is the first item that to me felt a bit off. I've come to expect fast forward romances in films today but one made in 1953 seemed odd.Back and forth situations of trust and deception follow as the various members of the party attempt to outdo one another in a rush to get to Africa and the lad deal. Billy tells them to stay calm and they'll get there just fine but since these are an untrustworthy group the odds of that happening are slim. Harry isn't aware of what is going on under his nose with Gwendolen and Billy and the same holds true for Maria who seems more concerned with how she plans to spend the money they will make as well as dreams of all things English.So with all of this going on why doesn't the movie work? To begin with the film has a tremendously slow pacing to it, more like reading a book than watching a movie. The high points are rarely treated as such and it feels like a level film rather than one with ups and downs that move a plot forward. The film also suffers from poor cinematography and film stock being used to make the picture, looking like a washed out foreign film of the time rather than something Hollywood would have produced. Between the cast, the director and a writer of stature (the script was written by Truman Capote) the expectations are high but never met.The end result is a film that drudges along and doesn't deliver until the final shot. Bogart was said to have been unhappy with the film, perhaps because he helped bankroll it and it lost money, saying "Only phonies like it." Critics either loved it or hated it and the reception wasn't as huge as one would expect. The owners of the film let it fall into public domain stature which may show their lack of faith in it as well. This accounts for the number of copies of the film available.On the plus side is the resurrection of the film for fans of the feature as well as all things Bogart. The Film Detective is a company that seems intent on presenting many features that have fallen into public domain in as best a condition as possible. To my knowledge this is the first time that the film has been offered in blu-ray format. The presentation is well made with a clean copy which is more than many companies who prey upon fans can claim when it comes to public domain titles. The Film Detective offers their products with minimal to non-existent extras (in this case a trailer) but movie fans are more concerned with the movie itself as opposed to umpteen extras. In this case the movie is the best presentation you are likely to find.Fans of Bogart and Huston anxious to complete their libraries will want to pick this one up. If you love old classic films you might enjoy it. Perhaps it's not their best effort but it is interesting and worth seeing at least once.

Having much of the same talent as 1951's masterpiece "The African Queen", this film comes off as a total contradiction in its entirety, giving a dark view of humanity at its most amoral and laughing at it at the same time. A group of strangers are crowded together on a steamer and something shady is afoot. At first, you really can't figure out what's going on, because every time that the writers drop an important plot point, a distraction occurs which moves it into a different direction. The film is alternately wise and confusing, one moment with leading man Humphrey Bogart standing out with me where he is informed that Hitler and Mussolini like leaders will soon destroy the world. Bogart simply states that he would like another year or two to continue to be miserable. That statement applies to how many people seem to feel today, a cynical society in an ever increasing dangerous world where unhappiness seems to be a better option than total oblivion.Replacing Sydney Greenstreet as the villainous fat man, Robert Morley is a total contrast to his fearful missionary in "The African Queen". He's so instantly smarmy, you're surprised anybody even wants to be around him. Add in Peter Lorre (sadly a very undefined character) and two leading ladies (Jennifer Jones, highly resembling Vivien Leigh in "A Streetcar Named Desire" and the luscious Gina Lollobrigida, obviously somebody's "kept woman" here), and you have a dream cast. The remainder of the cast are cynical men who seem intent on creating more unhappiness, and while there are some surprising plot twists and sudden turns (people are believed to be dead, incorrectly it turns out) and everybody is in danger at all times. A ship's steward politely tells Bogart that the ship is sinking as if announcing dinner. It is obvious that John Huston had his tongue so far into his cheek he could taste last week's dinner, yet the inside joke wasn't let out on an unsuspecting public who, according to reviews, just didn't get it. I did, but it may not have been the filmmaker's ideas that I got, just my own visions of what the film said, at least to me.Along with another independently made Bogart film ("The Barefoot Contessa"), this is a film that doesn't necessarily work but with its star performances and a few dropped intelligent witticisms, can inspire some great thought. Otherwise, however, it is a pretentious bore.