Stars: Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida, Robert Morley, Peter Lorre
Director: John Huston
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars
Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol." This month, our focus is on Gina Lollobrigida-click here to learn more about Ms. Lollobrigida (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.
We are not, sadly, going to start where I wanted to start with Gina Lollbrigida's career. One of the heartbreaking things for classic film fans in the age of streaming is that with the focus on the new, and with the same streaming platform randomly trading back-and-forth something like Back to the Future II or Cliffhanger, we end up in a situation where certain movies are never brought forward for streaming, and are almost impossible to find on home video. Thus is the case for Lollobrigida's first breakthrough role, Bread, Love and Dreams, which despite starring two major Italian actors (Lollobrigida and Vittorio de Sica), winning the Silver Bear at Berlin, and being an Oscar nominee (Best Motion Picture Story), is next-to-impossible to find even an affordable copy. Hopefully someday Criterion takes pity on us here, but until then, we're going to start with Lollobrigida's first major English-language film, Beat the Devil.
(Spoilers Ahead) Beat the Devil sounds in many ways like the sort of standard-fare we'd expect uniting Humphrey Bogart with John Huston. Bogie plays Billy Dannreuther, a broke (but formerly rich) American who is working with a group of criminals, led by Paterson (Morley), who are trying to buy up uranium-rich land in North Africa for cheap, scoring an easy buck. Paterson has had a man who was suspected of going after the same property killed, and Billy and his wife Maria (Lollobrigida) are trying to keep their heads down. Suddenly a British couple make their acquaintance: Harry (Edward Underdown) and his wife Gwendolen (Jones). The two accidentally set off the alarms of Paterson when Gwendolen, who is soon madly in love with Billy and starts having an affair with him, brags about her husband but is overheard by Paterson's accomplice Julius (Lorre), who assumes that Gwendolen's lies are true. They set off on a boat together, where "destiny lends a hand" allowing Harry, of all people, to purchase the land that Gwendolen lied about him buying (almost completely by accident), her running back to him, Billy & Maria getting nothing, and Paterson & his cronies ending up in jail.
This sounds like boilerplate film noir, but it doesn't play that way in the movie. For starters, you might not know this if this is the first time you've seen a movie like this (you should watch The Maltese Falcon and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre before tackling Beat the Devil), is that it's funny, and not because it's so-bad-it's-hilarious-it's meant to be funny. Beat the Devil was not a hit at the time, but has developed a cult following in the years since primarily because it's one of the first straight-up camp spoofs, not in the way Abbott & Costello would do with the Universal monsters, but instead in a subtler way. The villains are played as buffoons, and frequently you'll have what in a noir would be an obvious twist (a guy like Harry never lives through a traditional noir), go the complete opposite direction. The best example of this is toward the end, when it looks like Paterson is about to get away with a lenient cop, and then Gwendolen shouts out the entire criminal plot, accusing Paterson of murder, and she isn't put in danger nor does the cop doubt her. The penultimate scene has virtually no climax-just what would likely have happened in real life, rather than the expected chase or bullet Bogie will have to take for the female lead to protect her.
Lollobrigida supposedly hated making this movie, complaining that Bogart & Huston made fun of her. Indeed, the production of this film is kind of legend (one of several "Bogie & Huston want a vacation" sort of films they made together, and one where Truman Capote was writing the script as they went along), so it's fare to assume that this was rough on Lollobrigida, acting in a language that wasn't her primary for the first time. It shows in the script, too-Lollobrigida is fine, but ancillary, and isn't asked to do more than look beautiful. It's actually Jennifer Jones (who I'm not really a fan of), who gets the best part in the whole movie, totally selling the blonde, air-headed beauty & underlining the camp of the film better than any other actor.
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