Filming John Huston's adventure comedy, Beat the Devil, was so chaotic that Humphrey Bogart losing teeth was just one production calamity.
The Big Picture John Huston's 1953 comedic caper Beat the Devil has been simultaneously described as "ten years ahead of its time," the first camp classic, a "fascinating gem of cinematic chutzpah," and a "wet firecracker." The film, which was like no other film of the era and nothing else in the director's oeuvre, wasn't well-received by audiences at the time of its release, but it's since earned a devoted cult following of camp enthusiasts.
When their ship out of Italy is delayed , the group finds themselves stranded in the Mediterranean, and they befriend the Chelmses , a pair of supposedly upper-class Brits also headed to Africa to take over a coffee plantation left to them by a wealthy uncle.
While the source material is a straight thriller, Capote and Huston decided to rework the script as a parody, spoofing ultra-popular heist movies and crime thrillers of the 1940s such as Huston's own The Maltese Falcon. Only Huston and co-financier Bogart knew that the script was being written on the fly, with Huston going so far as to invent complicated camera setups in order to hold up filming while Capote finished a scene, per The Guardian.
The wrestling defeat wasn't the only time Bogart was injured during production: while he and Huston were being driven to a shooting location, their chauffeur crashed the car through a stone wall and into a ditch, knocking out Bogart's front bridge of teeth and badly cutting his tongue. As Huston later recalled, "When I realized he wasn't seriously hurt, I couldn't help laughing. Bogie glared at me.
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