Because of his Leftist political activities, the Englishman Claud Cockburn, a cousin of Evelyn and Alec Waugh, chose to publish his first novel, a thriller called Beat the Devil, under the pseudonym James Helvick. The book is a more hardboiled look at Brits Abroad than Cyril Connolly's The Rock Pool, but it’s in the same rich vein. In 1953, John Huston had been living part-time in Ireland and was a friend of Cockburn’s. Seeing potential in the book as another star vehicle for Humphrey Bogart, with whom he had already made five films, Huston bought the rights to the novel for $3,000 and hired Cockburn to assist him in the writing of the screenplay. After initial drafts, Huston replaced Cockburn with Truman Capote as co-scenarist for reasons that aren't exactly clear, as I will explore later.
The film drops us into the company of quasi-sinister grifters in Ravello, a town overlooking the Amalfi coast. Billy Dannreuther (Humphrey Bogart) is an American “down on his luck” who has fallen in with four equally dubious characters: Peterson (Robert Morley), Julius O’Hara (Peter Lorre), Ravello (Marco Tulli) and Major Jack Ross (Ivor Barnard). They are presently working on a scheme to cash in on uranium deposits recently discovered in British East Africa (Kenya). But we quickly discover that nothing is what it seems.
Into this nest of - albeit toothless - vipers come Harry and Gwendolyn Chelm (Edward Underdown and Jennifer Jones), a married British couple who appear to be tourists, but Gwendolyn assures anyone who cares to hear that her husband owns valuable property in - guess where - British East Africa. Billy and his wife Maria (Gina Lollabrigida) go to work on the Chelms, Billy on Gwendolyn and Maria on Harry, to find out if any of Gwnedolyn’s claims are for real. The plot thickens considerably until you realize that everything is a ruse to get you to sit still long enough (94 minutes in fact) to enjoy Huston’s send-up of his own The Maltese Falcon, released in 1940.
However Beat the Devil started out, Huston and Capote turned it into a spoof. According to one legend, the script was written piecemeal as the shooting proceeded. But this story is contradicted by Claud Cockburn’s son, Alexander, in the introduction to a new edition of the novel:
Though not an immediate success, the film of Beat the Devil has developed a cult following over the years, and in the US quite often bobs up on late night TV. One aspect of this cult caused some irritation to my father and indeed to the rest of the family. The film's credits announced the screenplay was by Truman Capote, from a novel by James Helvick. Admirers of the film professed to find evidence of Capote's mastery in every interstice of the dialogue and over the years Capote did nothing to dissuade them from this enthusiasm. But in fact his own contribution was limited to some concluding scenes, for it had chanced that during the final days of shooting in Italy the end had suddenly to be altered: as far as I can remember, the locale of the scenes had to be changed in a hurry. In the emergency, with my father back in Ireland, Capote, who happened to be visiting the set at the time, was drafted to do the necessary work and his name - more alluring than that of the unknown Helvick or the ex-Red Cockburn - scrambled into the credits. Although reissued as a paperback in 1971 Beat the Devil has been, till now, almost unobtainable and it's not the least of my pleasures that admirers of the film may now see that the inspiration for that dialogue came not from Capote but from my father.
My first impression on seeing the film was what a blast everyone involved in the making of it must've had for however many weeks in Ravello it took to complete. While Beat the Devil is effective as a spoof of the sort of film of which The Maltese Falcon is a perfect example, it actually pokes fun at itself as well. It makes one wonder what could’ve happened to Huston - and to Hollywood - in the thirteen years between. Certainly the war had something to do with his reluctance to commit to shooting exclusively in the studio, and it only proved the extent to which Huston had always been an outsider (and perhaps why, though it remains a mystery, Huston was never embraced by the auteurist gang).
But I can’t help thinking that making a self-mocking spoof of a classic film demonstrated, on Huston’s part anyway, a loss of nerve. No longer content to make films that stay within the confines of a genre, he chose instead to explode it - for laughs. It reminded me of François Truffaut when, in 1973, he turned away from making films like Two English Girls and The Wild Child and made La Nuit Americain, aka Day for Night - a film about Francois Truffaut, starring Truffaut, making a film called Je Vous Présente Paméla (Meet Pamela).
Day for Night was commercially successful, but Truffaut’s friends saw it as a sign of creative bankruptcy. It was a film about the making of a film, completely lacking in postmodern irony. Ostensibly Truffaut was exploring the joys and frustrations (otherwise known as the joys) of filmmaking, and he intended the film to be seen as a love letter to the medium. But what his contemporaries saw him doing was a once leading light of the French New Wave chasing his own tail.
Beat the Devil was a commercial flop. Humphrey Bogart disliked it, probably because he put up his own money to help get it made. It was trimmed on its release by four or five minutes and a clumsy narration spoken by Bogart was added (the last minute changes alluded to by Alexander Cockburn). Its copyright eventually lapsed and it entered the public domain. Through circuitous means, a restoration copyrighted by Sony was released in 2016 to renewed interest in the film. Roger Ebert added it to his list of Great Movies. It isn't a great film, but it's fun. As a successful parody it's one of those films that leaves you with a gratifying sense of having beaten the odds.
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