Beat the Devil (film)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Beat the Devil is a 1953 British film directed by John Huston, starring Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones and Gina Lollobrigida, and featuring Robert Morley, Peter Lorre and Bernard Lee. The screenplay was by Huston and Truman Capote, loosely based upon a novel of the same name by British journalist Claud Cockburn, writing under the pseudonym James Helvick. The film was deliberately made as a parody of a genre of film. Although it is often described as a parody of The Maltese Falcon itself, which was also directed by Huston and featured Bogart and Lorre, this is actually not the case. Capote is quoted as saying "John [Huston] and I decided to kid the story, to treat it as a parody. Instead of another Maltese Falcon, we turned it into a ... [spoof] on this type of film."
The script, which was written on a day-to-day basis as the film was being shot, concerns the adventures of a motley crew of swindlers and ne'er-do-wells trying to lay claim to land rich in uranium deposits in Kenya as they wait in a small Italian port to travel aboard an ill-fated tramp steamer en route to Mombasa.
