Some movies are so bizarre and weird that you just can’t believe they exist until you see them. Beat The Devil, John Huston’s 1953 film starring Humphrey Bogart, is one such film. Despite the film’s public domain status, it remains one of the funniest projects in Huston’s career and even features a script written with Truman Capote.
Beat The Devil is a European-set parody of Huston’s much more famous 1941 classic The Maltese Falcon, which also starred Bogart. The actor plays Billy, a formerly wealthy American stuck working with four sleazy crooks who want to steal uranium because they think it’s worth something. While waiting for a boat to take them to British East Africa, they meet Gwendolen (Jennifer Jones) and Harry (Edward Underdown), a British couple they think are the key to getting access to uranium.
But just like in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, the uranium gets shoved to the background as Billy starts to fall in love with Gwendolen and Harry begins falling for Billy’s wife, Maria (Gina Lollobrigida).
Beat The Devil is just so bizarre. From the running joke about Peter Lorre’s character being named “O’Hara” (because what kind of German name is ‘O’Hara’?) to the long scene where Bogart and Robert Morley are stuck chasing an empty car down a road, everything about this film feels unbelievable. There’s Jennifer Jones, an Oscar winning actress, often forgetting that she’s supposed to have a British accent. We’re supposed to expect that Bogart would cheat on Gina Lollobrigida? And that’s just the beginning of the weird stuff.
Still, Beat The Devil is a fun film because it’s clear that nearly everyone had fun making it. Supposedly Bogart wasn’t too happy about the final result because it lost money - specifically his money because he financed it - but everyone is having a blast making a movie outside Hollywood. It’s also endlessly interesting, because each time you see it, there will be some plot point you missed.
As a film in the public domain, no one has ever done a good restoration of Beat The Devil. A new label called The Film Detective released the first Blu-ray edition of the film in September and it simply doesn’t look good. Yes, it’s part of the company’s “Restored Classics” line, but whoever did the restoration didn’t do a thorough job. There’s scattered lines all over the place and the image often fluctuates and pulses. Plus, the release is actually a BD-R, not a pressed Blu-ray. And to add insult to injury, the movie poster on the cover is all blocky and digitized. It looks like someone just copied it from the film’s Wikipedia page and enlarged it.
All that said, this is probably the best edition of the film that will ever be released. No one is going to put in the money to make this movie look as good as it should, so The Film Detective’s Blu-ray will have to do for now.