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The actors are at every point so firmly held in the director's will that there are no performances of individual style. Still, Robert Morley is shrewdly used as the No. 1 no-good. Peter Lorre, too, is elegantly played for laughs as a German named O'Hara (pronounced O'Horror).
Of the principals, Jennifer Jones, her hair blonded for the occasion, does the best with the best part&−she manages to catch the mystic fervor of the truly creative liar. Bogart and Lollobrigida are a little too surface-smooth with their lines, suggesting sometimes that underneath the words they do not really know what they are up to.
The uncertainty is understandable in a picture cuffed off as casually as Beat the Devil was. The marvel is that there is not more uncertainty. And yet, actually, the bluffing and the weasels and the downright mistakes are what give this picture, as they give a jam session, its personal style. What one comes to hear is not the clinkers but those crazy riffs, of which Beat the Devil has some fine ones.
New Faces (Edward Alperson; 20th Century-Fox). The difference between stage and screen has been described as "the difference between a kiss on the lips and a kiss over the telephone." By this definition, it takes some vigorously imaginative cinematography to make a movie out of a stage show. In Top Banana (TIME, Feb. 22), and again in New Faces, the movie public is being offered Broadway revues, adapted to the screen with little more imagination than it takes to set up a camera unit in the front-row balcony. Both photoplays are literally photographed plays (most of New Faces was shot against the same flats used in the touring stage production), and as movies, they are rather like telephone kisses. But if the public likes them. Hollywood has found a cheap new way to make cine-musicals, for neither picture cost anywhere near $1,000,000.
On Broadway, New Faces had the irresistible appeal of freshness, bounce and intimacy. The production had concentrated youth−Singers Eartha Kitt. Robert Clary, June Carroll; Comics Ronny Graham and Alice Ghostley−along with some bright sketches and several good songs (Monotonous, Love Is a Simple Thing, I'm in Love with Miss Logan). Also, the show was ingratiatingly small: it played up, rather than down, to the audience.
In CinemaScope, New Faces is anything but small. Pint-sized (5 ft. i in.) Robert Clary looms over the customers like King Kong with a French accent. And minor skits like Snake Charmer (on his daily round of the downtown office buildings), which tickled theatergoers to laughter, deliver a hard bang on the moviegoer's funny bone.
Even so, Jukebox Favorite Eartha Kitt breaks through the film barrier at a disturbing velocity. This copper-colored daughter of a North Carolina cotton farmer, who quit the Katherine Dunham troupe to try for the big money, is neatly made, has a cobra-cold allure, sings well in both French and English, and dances with the unerring grace of a cat. More to the point, she makes the spectator feel like an iron filing when the magnet passes by.