Interlopers in a Foreign Land: “Beat the Devil” Returns to Theatres | MZS
The plot is complex, though to Huston and Capote’s credit, it’s not that hard to follow if you’re paying attention. Billy Dannreuther (Humphrey Bogart), a once rich man who lost his fortune, is living in an Italian port city with his wife Maria (Gina Lollobrigida), plotting with four deeply untrustworthy men (Lorre, Robert Morley, Ivor Barnard and Marco Tulli) to grab some uranium-rich land in British colonial Africa. They’re hoping to leave on a boat, but there are technical and staffing problems (the captain is a drunk). The first half of the film is all buildup to the voyage, which, let’s say, does not go as planned. Along the way, the Dannreuthers encounter another couple, Harry and Gwendolen Chelm (Edward Underdown and Jennifer Jones). Gwendolen falls for Billy, or at least we’re led to believe she does—like Bogart’s relationship with Mary Astor in “The Maltese Falcon,” we feel sure that ulterior motives complicate any sincere affection.
Harry is not the seemingly clueless person he appears to be, either. Nobody in this film is quite as advertised, and that’s part of the fun of watching it. Characters that seem like incompetent blusterers or hangers-on prove unexpectedly resourceful, and ones that seem formidable reveal weaknesses we might not have imagined when we first met them. Capote has a lot of fun with the actors’ apparent miscasting. Lollobrigida’s character carries on like a stereotypical tea-and-crumpets Englishwoman, though without the accent, of course, and in time. you accept her as an Italian Angolophile (or something). Lorre, an Austrian Jew, plays a character named O’Hara, and explains, “Many Germans in Chile have come to be called O’Hara,” looking as if he can’t quite believe it, either. (His cigarette holder deserved its own screen credit: from a distance it looks as if Lorre is smoking a fine artist’s paintbrush.) Huston, who devoted a great deal of energy toward polishing his own image as a globetrotting macho adventurer, is very much at home directing a movie about a bunch of Westerners who are out of their element but protected by racial and economic privilege; to his credit, he makes them all seem slightly ridiculous, sometimes more than slightly. As Ebert wrote, “Once we catch on that nothing much is going to happen, we can relax and share the amusement of the actors, who are essentially being asked to share their playfulness.”
Bogart hated the movie, and after its release declared, “only phonies like it.” He signed on to the project because he wanted to make a serious anti-colonial statement, and when “Beat the Devil” turned into something more overtly light and “just kidding,” he soured on it. But you can’t tell that from his performance. He excelled at playing characters who knew themselves well and were good at sizing other people up and seeing through their cherished delusions, but who nevertheless succumbed to basic instincts anyway—greed, desire, rage, vengeance—and remained tragically self-aware as they went down in flames. That’s Billy. Bogart gets Billy. You can tell he likes playing him, that the character fits him like the character’s tailored suits.
