Word: huston
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Huston and his troupe hoped to pull a joke on their old faithful audiences, the joke falls somewhere else, because Beat The Devil is better than any stock article...
When a topnotch director, a novelist with a sense of humor, and a bunch of witty actors meet on the Italian Riviera, the result can be a good time. When the director is John Huston, the writer Truman Capote, and when the actors include Bogart, Lorre and Lollobrigida, the result was Beat the Devil, and it is a very good time...
...Huston's direction is real artistry. The Italian scenes were all shot in that vibrant natural light Huston manages to record. Every shot is composed with the care and sense of proportion found in a good salon still. The film as a whole is a good-natured and beautifully turned-out joke, a string of very funny, often non-sequitur, sequences...
...stored in cracked ice. On top of the heat there were insects, malaria, dysentery. By the third day, cast and crew were dropping like flies. In 4½ months of shooting, 30 doctors handled 960 sick calls. Eddie Albert had sunstroke and spent several days in delirium. Director John Huston got a foot infection and broke out in sties. Producer Zanuck developed shingles when it was all over-possibly aggravated by the realization that he had spent $4,000,000 to make an interesting but curiously unconvincing picture...
These statements, which contain the essential message of the film, have poetic light and spiritual resonance, but they read better than they sound from the screen. Despite intelligent acting by Actor Howard, skillful touches from Director Huston and some awesome landscapes with elephants, this huge (2 hrs. 11 mins.) movie finally seems no more than a literary notion that has apparently suffered, along with CinemaScope and DeLuxe color, a severe attack of elephantiasis...