Eat the Devil

I just saw "Beat the Devil" for the first time and don't think it can be so easily summed up as a spoof, or a comedy, although it is very funny, but it's more sublime. Truman Capote wrote it in what I can only imagine was a burst of creativity and it feels like all of his love of movies and screen stars just came bursting out of him in an unparalleled sort of rush, that leaves the viewer just dizzy with joy, because he made almost every line of this script a zinger. The plot is confusing too, in a grand Noir tradition, but it almost unravels on itself, and the plot becomes secondary to the sheer fun that Capote and the actors are having with the script, but it's more than fun, and it's more than comedy. I'd call the film 'surrealist' (and yes, I use film, because it's beautifully shot in an Italian sea villa by John Huston, a director I usually find over rated, but not this time, and read that he'd take extra long to set up because he didn't want the actors to know a 28 year old Capote was writing the script on the spot.) What emerges almost accidentally, aside from the whole movie, is a sort of existential feel that reminded me a little of "Wages of Fear," or Bunuel's, "Exterminating Angel," so maybe I'd say the young and brilliant Capote hit on a mood of the day, but presented it in the guise of a Noir (like "Wages"). It's no secret that Capote was gay (though it may have been back then, if you were clueless) and he also gave the script a sort of American camp that may not have been invented yet, and it makes it so fun, that it's hard to really describe. It just has that great movie feeling where one outrageous thing after another keeps piling up, and the goal becomes to show the insanity of the world, in a sort of blindingly witty way that wasn't exactly spoof like "Airplane," or black comedy, like so many English movies, but an existential surreal vision of life, that is actually quite brutal at bottom, like the two other movies mentioned. The brutality is so funny we just laugh, kind of like Beckett wanted us to in "Waiting for Godot," but that was a play with great characters. The charm to "Wages," "Exterminating," and "Devil," is that they are not so much character driven, as idea driven, with a thick plot that gives away at a certain point to a mood that makes the film more like a painting, than a night at the theater. It's a mad museum of humanity, where the characters smile, sneer, and laugh in the most witty way about the useless absurdity of life, but they are not remembered so much for their depth of soul, or wit, like the tramps in "Godot," but their reaction to an existential crisis, wrapped in a crime era plot. Again, "Beat the Devil," takes it a little farther than those other two films because I'm not even sure the characters will be remembered for their reaction to the events, but the insanity that it causes in them. The last scene in the film has Bogie literally laughing hysterically at the final plot twist that comes Western Union, and you can almost see him fall off his seat as the film dissolves.