John Huston’s “Beat the Devil,” the Humphrey Bogart vehicle once advertised as a decade ahead of its time, is now an official senior citizen, having opened in New York 65 years ago this month. One of the first Hollywood productions to be hailed as a cult film, this parodic thriller about a bumbling scheme to loot Africa’s uranium mines was an outlier in the successful Huston-Bogart collaborations. Bogart stars as a middle-aged fixer hired by a ragtag group of crooks who become entangled with a seemingly innocent British couple (Jennifer Jones and Edward Underdown). Given the movie’s shaggy-dog quest, Huston evidently imagined “Beat the Devil” as another “Maltese Falcon,” his first film, even casting Peter Lorre, a featured player in “Maltese Falcon,” for good luck, with the portly Robert Morley standing in for Sydney Greenstreet, a seeker of the falcon. Visiting the town of Ravello on Italy’s Amalfi Coast, where “Beat the Devil” was being filmed, a New York Times reporter noted that Huston was harking back to another one of his Bogart triumphs, “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”The gale of laughter that ends “Beat the Devil” does recall “Sierra Madre,” but this time the joke was on Huston.

Source: The North Africa Journal March 29, 2019 13:52 UTC