Beat the Devil (Santana; United Artists), if it is any one thing at all, is as elaborate a shaggy-dog story as has ever been told. It was made up by Author Truman (Other Voices, Other Rooms) Capote and Director John (The African Queen) Huston during the spring season last year at Ravello, on the Gulf of Sorrento, apparently by stirring Strega fumes slowly into a novel by James Helvick. Because Huston happened to have $1,000,000 and several talented actors at his disposal, everybody fell to and turned the bibble-babble into a movie.
When shooting started, only Huston and Capote knew what the story was. "And I have a suspicion," Capote said later, "that John wasn't too clear about it." Surprisingly, Beat the Devil turns out to be a sort of screwball classic. It is the first movie since On Approval−that scintillating paste-jewel of a picture with Beatrice Lillie and Clive Brook−to torture the moviegoer by making him positively ache to laugh, and then deliberately forcing him to hold it and hold it until he is ready to scream.
An American ne'er-do-well (Humphrey Bogart) is bound for British East Africa with his Italian wife (Gina Lollobrigida) and four "business associates" (Robert Morley, Peter Lorre, Marco Tulli, Ivor Bernard). "They're desperate characters," concludes one feminine fellow passenger. "Not one of them looked at my legs." The four, when pressed, declare that they are going to sell vacuum cleaners in Kenya ("Hut to hut?" somebody asks), but actually they are off to swing a big uranium swindle. Stranded at a small Italian port while their steamer makes repairs, the six fall in with a discreetly bogus British peer Edward Underdown) and his wife (Jennifer Jones), a virtuoso liar who spends nost of the picture in a state of cadenza.
The fun begins when Bogart starts to hustle Jennifer, while Gina bares some exciting intentions to her rival's husband. The four villains watch this game of amatory cat's cradle with alarm, and soon read into it a counterplot to deactivate the uranium deal. On the way to Africa, they decide to cash in the counterfeit count because he has sniffed out their game; but the ship opportunely starts to sink, the victim disappears overboard, and the seven survivors reach shore only to be seized as spies by the Arabs. In the end, the fourflushing foursome are clapped in the clink because Jennifer, for once in her life, tells the truth.
What has to be felt to be believed in all this is the eerie sense of double meaning that haunts every scene. On the one hand, Beat the Devil contains all the elements of the slick international-type thriller: the recondite little spa, the beautiful women of uncertain background, the hero going downhill with a rose in his teeth, the sullen gang of heavies in the shrubbery.
Yet each of these cinematic clichés appears to be placed in the very faintest of mocking quotation marks. Is it sex on the beach they want? Huston crams the frame so full of Gina fore and Jennifer aft that it looks like a wish-you-were-here postcard from Coney Island. The rifled dispatch case? When the four villains rummage through the Englishman's box, they find nothing but a letter to a minor colonial official and a hot water bottle−and are humiliatingly caught in the act to boot.