Word: huston
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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...
...each of these cinematic clichés appears to be placed in the very faintest of mocking quotation marks. Is it sex on the beach they want? Huston crams the frame so full of Gina fore and Jennifer aft that it looks like a wish-you-were-here postcard from Coney Island. The rifled dispatch case? When the four villains rummage through the Englishman's box, they find nothing but a letter to a minor colonial official and a hot water bottle−and are humiliatingly caught in the act to boot...
...communities, has come to Philadelphia's Main Line, but along the Line can still be found French chateaux bordering colonial farmhouses, Moorish palaces nudging Scottish castles. And the old-style breed of Main Line aristocrat can still be found, holding on. In The Saving Grace, Novelist Mc-Cready Huston conducts a guided tour in the manner of a regional John P. Marquand. At the windup, Novelist Huston's poor but honest working girl has sidetracked her Main Liner into matrimony without even trying...
Before Rose accepts Hume's offer of marriage, she has refused proposals from two other Main Liners. Her "simple unaffectedness" seems to be irresistible. As for Main Liners, Hume defends them against the common accusation of being lordly by firmly declaring, "We are plain people." Within Novelist Huston's one-dimensional range, they are so plain as to seem commonplace, but that may not be entirely the author's fault...