Review of Beat the Devil (1953) by Edith N — 27 Feb 2008

Once again, I have very little idea what's going on, and this time, I don't even find the mood all that interesting. I think half the characters are imbeciles, and I don't think any of them are that appealing. Humphrey Bogart is playing Humphrey Bogart; his character ignores his wife, Gina Lollobrigida, in favour of the rather ordinary Jennifer Jones. He's involved in a racket with a bunch of people he doesn't like. Why? Who knows? Not even what the racket is really matters--it is, as Hitchcock would have called it, a MacGuffin. Frankly, I get the impression that not even the conspirators really understand what's going on, much less anyone in the audience.

So. Humphrey Bogart, et. al., are, um . . . oh, right. They're trying to sail to Africa because of something vague to do with uranium. Why this requires all five conspirators, I cannot say. At any rate, they are going to sail there--because one of them is afraid to fly, and for reasons I, as I said, don't understand, they all have to go together. I also fail to understand what Maria Dannreuther (Lollobrigida), Billy's (Bogart's) wife, is doing on the trip or why Harry Chelm (Edward Underdown) and his wife, Gwendolen (Jennifer Jones) are going to Africa at all. It's a setup to give us a plot, and it's a [i]clumsy[/i] setup at that.

There are some good performers in this. Bogart, of course, and while Lollobrigida is pretty much in there to have breasts, she's not bad. Jones is doing the best she can with some lousy material. And Peter Lorre . . . poor Peter Lorre. So much talent wasted. I don't think he gets more than a couple of dozen lines. He seems to be there because we're used to him playing creepy, untrustworthy characters. He's a cheap attempt to set mood. The movie is full of bad attempts at things. That these people are in it at all, frankly, is what's getting it a positive review.

The scenery in the beginning is nice. There's a lot of interesting setup for the Bogart character--too bad it never actually leads to anything. I don't get what the Chelms' real status has to do with anything, though I suppose it might be to make the conspirators afraid to actually do anything to him. Maybe it's there to give things a more sinister air; if so, it fails miserably. As does so much else.

Honestly, I don't understand why so many people rate this movie so highly. It appears in Ebert's [i]The Great Movies II[/i] and [i]1001 Movies Everyone Should See Before They Die[/i]. Honestly? You can give this a miss. I'll note that it's currently at 6.5 on IMDB with 2020 votes, so clearly, there are a lot of other people who don't like it, either. Oh, and the video quality is awful. There are skips and "crackles" to it, and that just makes hunting this movie down even less worth it.