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Beating the Devil
With a script largely written on set, John Huston’s Beat the Devil is a highly unconventional movie with a wry, self-reflective sense of humour. Rod Stoneman reflects on this lesser-known work by a major director.
Last year, the centenary of Huston’s birth saw renewed interest in his wide-ranging oeuvre: thirty-seven features, nearly all of which are literary adaptations. Alongside his more famous movies, Beat the Devil is one of the least well-known of these adaptations. Taken from a novel written by one ‘James Helvick’, actually the left-wing journalist Claud Cockburn who had just been denounced by Senator Joe McCarthy as ‘the 84th most dangerous Red in the world’. Living in Co. Limerick and in serious need of cash, Cockburn had sold the rights to Bogart as a result of Huston’s recommendation (for $10,000 according to Huston, or £3,000 according to Cockburn’s son Patrick).
A draft scenario was written, a cast assembled, then they headed for Italy in 1953 with script described by Peter Viertel (who co-wrote it with Anthony Veiller) as ‘lacking a central plot. The dialogue was good and the characters were unusual but the structure was lacking’. Humphrey Bogart, who invested in the film, initially saw it as ‘a chance to make some real money’, but then Huston warned him, ‘We haven’t got a script, and I don’t know what the hell is going to come of this. It may be a disaster. In fact, it’s got all the earmarks of a disaster’. He was relieved by Bogart’s irrefutable response, ‘Hell, it’s only money’. They arrived in Italy with a cast and budget but no script or scriptwriter, apparently finding Truman Capote ‘on the street in Rome’, and all decamped to a villa in Ravello, a small town South of Naples, to make a movie.
The full article is printed in Film Ireland 116.
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