Word: deviled
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Beat the Devil (Santana; United Artists), if it is any one thing at all, is as elaborate a shaggy-dog story as has ever been told. It was made up by Author Truman (Other Voices, Other Rooms) Capote and Director John (The African Queen) Huston during the spring season last year at Ravello, on the Gulf of Sorrento, apparently by stirring Strega fumes slowly into a novel by James Helvick. Because Huston happened to have $1,000,000 and several talented actors at his disposal, everybody fell to and turned the bibble-babble into a movie...
When shooting started, only Huston and Capote knew what the story was. "And I have a suspicion," Capote said later, "that John wasn't too clear about it." Surprisingly, Beat the Devil turns out to be a sort of screwball classic. It is the first movie since On Approval−that scintillating paste-jewel of a picture with Beatrice Lillie and Clive Brook−to torture the moviegoer by making him positively ache to laugh, and then deliberately forcing him to hold it and hold it until he is ready to scream...
What has to be felt to be believed in all this is the eerie sense of double meaning that haunts every scene. On the one hand, Beat the Devil contains all the elements of the slick international-type thriller: the recondite little spa, the beautiful women of uncertain background, the hero going downhill with a rose in his teeth, the sullen gang of heavies in the shrubbery...
...uncertainty is understandable in a picture cuffed off as casually as Beat the Devil was. The marvel is that there is not more uncertainty. And yet, actually, the bluffing and the weasels and the downright mistakes are what give this picture, as they give a jam session, its personal style. What one comes to hear is not the clinkers but those crazy riffs, of which Beat the Devil has some fine ones...
Those who judge Botteghe by its contributions in English will find a mixed bag. Poet-Novelist Robert Graves (I, Claudius, Sergeant Lamb's America) leads off with The Devil Is a Protestant, a mildly humorous essay contrasting the austerities of Protestant worship and Roman Catholicism's stress on rich symbolisms. Any Graves fan can see that a talented righthander has been giving his left hand a workout. But there are well-written, offbeat stories by such U.S. writers as Alfred Chester and Elizabeth Hardwick that few magazines would try out on their readers. The princess thought they were...