Beat the Devil (1953)
A riotous, imperfect, silly, brazen, forward thinking, throwaway, brilliant spoof.
For starters, you know something will happen with Huston directing Bogart. And throw in an aging bulging Peter Lorre as a German named O'Hara. O'Hara comes into a room and says to Bogart, playing a disaffected American, "Why do you always make jokes about my name, huh? In Chile the name of O'Hara is, is a tip top name. Many Germans in Chile have become to be called O'Hara."
And so there is a dig at a lot of stereotypes, most of them with shades of truth. The style of the film is not film noir, as many people say, but more just an intrigue or war time spy film. The most direct connection seems to be Huston's own Maltese Falcon, but even this is based on Bogart and Lorre appearing in both films (as well as a fun appearance in Beat the Devil by Robert Morely doing a kind of less pleasant Sidney Greenstreet).
I sensed a lot of direct influence from Lady from Shanghai, an overlooked and frankly brilliant and daring Orson Welles film from a few years earlier. Check out the slightly surreal plot, the strange sequences of locations (land, boat, land, with an exotic overture in the middle), and the characters themselves, including Jennifer Jones as a kind of decorative female not unlike Rita Hayworth in Shanghai. There is even a man-to-man discussion of Heyworth in Beat the Devil between Bogart and a unlikely Muslim captor in a generally hilarious scene.
The film is flawed by its own excesses at times, and by a kind of frivolousness that Welles, for one, avoided by making his film's excesses more formal and less literary. Huston, like Bogart, was literate by nature, as a lot of heavy drinking men were in those days, and the dialog, as brilliant as it is (and shepherded along by Huston and Truman Capote in tandem), isn't always in synch with the acting, and with the flow of events. So if we don't really expect anything from the plot, per se, knowing it's all just in fun, we come to expect more from the series of remarks, the twists of fate, and the yawning expectations of an audience used to very high quality writing and acting by 1953.
I know some people who just can't finish watching this because it strikes them as phony and childish. Bogart might agree--he lost money on the production. But there are some great moments, and an ongoing repartee that works well, or works superbly, at different moments. I'd cash out a couple of actors for others more idiosyncratic, I think. But no one asked me, I know. Watch it for what it is. And check out Lady from Shanghai and see if you see what I mean.
