Beat the Devil

It's a fascinating history of the place and I was there frequently and witnessed all this.

It was on a double bill with a film called Beat the Devil because the programmer clearly thought that was a horror movie, let's do a horror double.

It's a 1950s film with Robert Morley and Humphrey Bogart about swindlers on a yacht.

But it's a very good film.

Like, Karloff can play the horror and the drama correctly, but he also has a little bit of touch of the humor on it.

And I don't know if Bogart... was able to tongue-in-cheek in that genre the way he would be able to in something like Beat the Devil.

I think he almost kind of feels like he has to oversell the horror, and he doesn't have fun with the role as a result.

Maybe correct me if I'm wrong, if you notice it.

So you had a lot of choices.

Also playing in NYC that weekend, Eight and a Half, Captain Newman, M.D., Love with the Proper Stranger, The Sporting Life, Sunday in New York, Tom Jones, America, America, Point of Order, Bergman's The Silence, Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well, a re-release of Beat the Devil, and this would have been a pretty good double feature, Dr. Strangelove had opened about three weeks earlier.

Mike, what were the news headlines on that day?

Wednesday, February 19, 1964, and the world is a very dangerous place.

[gentle music] That night, I took my constitutional down Main Street.

The town was dead, dark like a blackout, except for the one movie marquee, a first-run picture, Beat the Devil with Humphrey Bogart.

I thought of going in to see it as an editor for In Action when I heard the fire engine.

The whole Greensville Volunteer Fire Department, racing parallel toward the southern edge of town, where the Dexter Dean Chemical Plant was.