Beat The Devil

Adventure At Its Boldest! Bogart At His Best!

Beat the Devil is a witty, dry-humored, and well-plotted spoof of the classic capers popular at the time. The film, written by famed author Truman Capote, is centered on a group of four crooks played by Humphrey Bogart, Robert Morley, Peter Lorre and Gina Lollobrigida, all of which are traveling to Africa under the guise of selling vacuum cleaners. Their true motivation for the trip is to get rich off of uranium by smuggling it out of East Africa. Joining the group is a prim British couple claiming to run a coffee plantation there. It doesn't take long, however, for the couple to find themselves entangled in Bogart's devious scheme. But the trip doesn't go as smoothly as planned, and the African bound band quickly learns that their means of transportation - a steamer - is malfunctioning. This is the first incident in a string of misadventures and double crosses that come to a head when the uranium hunters wind up facing death at the hands of an Arab firing squad, unless they can devise a plan to...Beat the Devil. The film, shining example of Bogart's acting career, is comic and unpredictable, but nonetheless it is one of his lesser-known works - a sleeping giant that will greatly please Bogart fans.

Beat the Devil, his last film with his close friend and favorite director John Huston, also enjoys a cult following. Co-written by Truman Capote, the movie is a parody of The Maltese Falcon, and is a tale of an amoral group of rogues chasing an unattainable treasure, in this instance uranium.[