Grade: A+
This comedy adventure film directed and written by John Huston with Truman Capote is luxuriously elating, like floating over the Swiss alps in a hot air balloon while giggling tipsy from champagne.
It opens in a Mediterranean port city where “four brilliant criminals” are led in handcuffs through the streets to the clink. A marching band accompanies them and the band’s jolly marching tune turns the crooks’ obvious failure into a parade.
The film then flashes back to tell you how these crooks messed it up.
Therein lies the film’s tickling dramatic tension. In every scene I was wondering “How will these crooks bugger up?”
The man who described them as brilliant criminals is Humphrey Bogart playing Billy Dannreuther. He was a rich man but now he’s a poor man, and he’s gone into business with these crooks so he can be rich again. Accompanying him is his gorgeous wife Maria played by Gina Lollobrigida who Bogart said made Marilyn Monroe look like Shirley Temple.
This glamorous gang suffers one hilarious accident after another. Their ship’s captain gets drunk, they push their car off a cliff, and they’re captured by an Arab general who’s also got a fan-crush on Rita Hayworth. Bogart, of course, promises to introduce him to her if he lets them go.
He and his co-conspirators are trapped in a carnivalesque purgatory but they laugh off the slings and arrows of comedic fortune with witty one-liners. “What have you got to worry about?” Billy asks the gang’s leader with nonchalant when their ship breaks down halfway across the Mediterranean. “We’re only adrift in the middle of the ocean with a drunken captain and an engine liable to explode at any minute.”
Billy treats this high misadventure like a splendid holiday. Sitting back and watching the film on my laptop,[1] I felt like that’s exactly what it was.
[1] The film’s in the public domain. You can watch the original black and white here but I suggest watching the coloured version on Amazon Prime.
Such a surreal movie--great review!!