Beat the Devil (1953)

How could a Bogart/Hurston/Capote/Lorre movie not be an immediate winner?

I'm sure I've seen this one before (I checked, and I did about 10 years ago), but like a lot of movies I've previously watched, if I wasn't writing a review and trying to remember what I thought, I completely forgot almost everything about any previous viewing.

My copy of the film is not restored -- although on the cover it claims to be. That's the first thing I noticed. I put the DVD in, and it just immediately starts to play the movie. I take a quick look at the reviews for the film, and I see that quite a few people comment that it was "made on the fly" without a real script, and that Hurston made it just to have an excuse to drink and smoke with Bogart. All of that seems rather dismissive, and the non-restored quality reinforces the idea that no one on the film side thinks it's a classic worth the effort to maintain.

Then some of Bogart's early lines. He does seem to be parroting them back without any real feeling. But that's just sometimes. Other times, he seems to be more in the part. Some of the "sweeping crane(?)" shots are interesting. Bogart's talking to a British woman, and then the crane sweeps back and we see Lorre eavesdropping on their conversation from above. That' kind of cool...

Lorre, by the way, looks so old and fat in this one. I figured this must be his last film. Funny thing is, he's not even 50, and he'd go on to live for another decade and do a lot more TV and movie roles. But he sure looks like he had a hard life, especially when you think about what he looked like just a decade earlier in Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon.

Okay, so the film doesn't work, and it takes a long time to go nowhere. Bogart's four "associates" never really develop individual personalities, and the two interchangeable women are, what, romantic comic relief?

Meanwhile, what's Bogart's character's motivation? What does he want? Everyone seems trapped in movie purgatory, and perhaps this is the result of not having more than a daily script. It must be hard to play a part when your part is being written daily, and you don't know who you are where you're going.

Rating: 1/5

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