Summer Under the Stars 2011 --- Day Seventeen Review: Beat the Devil

One of the stories that exists about the 1953 noir satire Beat the Devil is that star Humphrey Bogart didn't particularly like screenwriter Truman Capote until Capote twice beat him at arm wrestling, after which they maintained a mutual respect, especially as Bogart marveled at the way Capote could write scenes for the script as needed, pounding out pages while the actors stood by waiting for their lines. Which is all well and good for Capote, but for my money, the final result seems like it was written at the last minute, and I tend to agree with Bogart's later assessment that the film was one of the worst he ever made.

Beat the Devil isn't a terrible film, per se, but I'm not sure it completely works as a satire of the genre that Bogart and director John Huston pioneered -- or, if it does, it does so in a way that is lost on a great many people, including myself. The film isn't exactly funny, but that's not the problem: satires, unlike parodies, need not necessarily be funny, but they are supposed to point out the flaws in the things they're satirizing, and in that regard Beat the Devil doesn't so much satirize film noir as it does imitate it in a ridiculous way. I mean, the characters in Beat the Devil are obviously silly, stupid versions of some of the archetypes from cinema in the forties, so I don't agree with the critique that the film misses the mark so completely that it just seems like a bad noir, but at the same time it seems rather directionless, without any real point to make about its chosen subject: why are the characters silly and stupid? What is Capote trying to say? If he's just poking fun at movies like The Maltese Falcon for the sake of poking fun, then he's really doing more of a light parody, but in that case the fact that the film isn't very funny is a problem.

To be fair, parts of Beat the Devil do work, especially the scenes involving Jennifer Jones as a woman who is both more intelligent and less intelligent that she initially seems. Playing the bored wife of a vacationing Englishman, she's correct in assuming that her fellow travelers (Bogart, et al.) have nefarious plans for some uranium-rich land in Africa, but as the victim of an overactive imagination, her hunches prove to be as much romantic fancies as they are keen observations.  Jones looks a bit odd here -- she was typically a brunette, and her blond hair in this movie washes her out and makes her face look too shiny, and rather like she can't close her lips over her teeth -- but she's the only actor who seems to be having any fun in her role, and the only one who seems confident in the way she's playing her scenes. You know a satire isn't working when the actors appear just as unsure of its intentions as the audience.

Beat the Devil is the sort of film that would probably benefit greatly from a second viewing, because once you realize the story isn't going anywhere (and was never important in the first place), I suspect it would be easier to sit back and take in the satirical aspects of Capote's writing. The film has certainly gained a cult following in the years since its release among people who consider it both brilliant and misunderstood. I would suggest that the "misunderstood" aspect comes from the muddled message, but I'm also willing to admit that the film has some artistic merit that I'm just not seeing.

Grade: C