{"id":14673,"date":"2010-10-02T17:00:51","date_gmt":"2010-10-02T21:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=14673"},"modified":"2010-10-02T17:00:51","modified_gmt":"2010-10-02T21:00:51","slug":"saturday-night-at-the-movies-beat-the-devil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/10\/02\/saturday-night-at-the-movies-beat-the-devil\/","title":{"rendered":"Saturday Night at the Movies: &#8220;Beat the Devil&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=uzrhHb1ooZo&amp;ob=av1e<\/p>\n<p><em>(Not embedded: Click the image above and then hit the YouTube link.\u00a0 This version is of a very high quality: excellent sound and picture.)<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Frye seemed to like going to the movies, and he regularly mentions during his diary writing years (intermittently between 1942 and 1955) what he&#8217;d seen on a Saturday night at a time when double bills were still the norm.\u00a0 One of the oddball classics of the era was <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/John_Huston\" target=\"_blank\">John Huston<\/a>&#8216;s <em><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Beat_the_Devil_%28film%29\" target=\"_blank\">Beat the Devil<\/a> <\/em>(1953).\u00a0 Maybe &#8220;John Huston&#8217;s <em>Beat the Devil<\/em>&#8221; doesn&#8217;t really cover it.\u00a0 In point of fact, it was co-written with Huston by the very young <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Truman_Capote\" target=\"_blank\">Truman Capote<\/a>, who leaves a distinctive mark upon this shaggy dog story which proceeds on the assumption that it is the journey not the arrival that matters, but then barely manages to go anywhere at all.\u00a0 In point of fact, it has such a tremendous cast &#8212; <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Humphrey_Bogart\" target=\"_blank\">Humphrey Bogart<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Gina_Lollobrigida\" target=\"_blank\">Gina Lollobrigida<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Robert_Morley\" target=\"_blank\">Robert Morley<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Peter_Lorre\" target=\"_blank\">Peter Lorre<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ivor_Barnard\" target=\"_blank\">Ivor Bernard<\/a> &#8212; that it&#8217;s hard to imagine the movie having any life without them.\u00a0 And, in point of fact, that&#8217;s before you even factor in <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Jennifer_Jones\" target=\"_blank\">Jennifer Jones<\/a>, who is so wonderful that she almost steals the entire movie from this pretty formidable ensemble.\u00a0 (In point of fact, she makes the phrase &#8220;in point of fact&#8221; all her own as a leitmotif for escalating delirium.)<\/p>\n<p>Now it&#8217;s true that the film depicts the last gasp of Old World colonialism, when European scoundrels could still saunter into Africa and expect to make personal fortunes by foul means (and, yes, there&#8217;s a cringe-inducing amount of Orientalism at work too in the depiction of the Arab characters).\u00a0 But the white mischief on display here is absurd and is foiled at every turn as though that were an inevitability.\u00a0 At least one tragic historical cycle had come all the way round to farce, and the film &#8212; released just a few years after the end of the Second World War &#8212; captures that, if only on a hunch.<\/p>\n<p>In a nice coincidence, Capote&#8217;s birthday was on Thursday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=uzrhHb1ooZo&amp;ob=av1e (Not embedded: Click the image above and then hit the YouTube link.\u00a0 This version is of a very high quality: excellent sound and picture.) Frye seemed to like going to the movies, and he regularly mentions during his diary writing years (intermittently between 1942 and 1955) what he&#8217;d seen on a Saturday night at [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[140,165],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-saturday-night","category-video"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Saturday Night at the Movies: &quot;Beat the Devil&quot; - The Educated Imagination<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/10\/02\/saturday-night-at-the-movies-beat-the-devil\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Saturday Night at the Movies: &quot;Beat the Devil&quot; - The Educated Imagination\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=uzrhHb1ooZo&amp;ob=av1e (Not embedded: Click the image above and then hit the YouTube link.\u00a0 This version is of a very high quality: excellent sound and picture.) 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