We're No Angels (1955, Michael Curtiz)

61/100

The rare movie that I recognize as a failure but enjoy anyway. Contemporaneous reviews suggest that the source play (which those critics much preferred) actively went for and got laughs—not sure whether it qualified as black comedy, but it was clearly some sort of comedy. Whereas this sucker just sort of ambles along, content to cultivate a general feeling of amiability (or maybe ambleability), even when that ought to be superficially counterproductive. Bogart in particular seems woefully miscast as a wily sell-a-fridge-to-an-Eskimo crook who struggles not to grow attached to this super-nice family that the trio intends to murder in their sleep and rob; it's possible that he'd been diagnosed with cancer by then (died 18 months after the film's release), and was already starting to feel tired. Looks it, anyway. Yet I still had a good time, and I think that's because We're No Angels takes its tonal cue from Peter Ustinov, who spends the entire movie radiating droll amusement and couldn't be more appealing. "Nothing ever really seems to be at stake, not even comedically" sounds disastrous, but we're talking about a story in which the bad guys, all confessed thieves and killers, sorta get outflanked into the moral center by wealthy douchebags (father and son) who make our anti-heroes look decent by comparison. A story that resolves its plot by having both douchebags get bitten by a poisonous snake (separately, offscreen), with the ostensible dramatic climax consisting of three disreputable men acknowledging aloud that they should probably warn one potential victim about the snake and then deciding practically in slow motion which of them will do so. While I can vaguely imagine a different, much funnier staging of that scene, Curtiz' lackadaisical approach, in conjunction with all three lead actors doing as little as they think they can get away with, has a bizarre ornery integrity of its own (and defuses the disturbing Walter-White-lets-Jane-asphyxiate-on-her-own-vomit aspect, which I feel like a genuinely funny version could not manage). I cannot mount a semi-objective defense of this picture, but I also cannot pretend not to have grinned my way through it. It's stuck at grin level, by design. And I'll grin again in future whenever I steal its one great line, sneered by Basil Rathbone: "Your opinion of me has no cash value."

(Also rewatched the Neil Jordan remake, which will be part of the next Quibi post. No need to address it here because it has almost literally nothing to do with this film—Mamet, who somehow leapt forward in time to tap into his present-day brain damage, took the basic idea "escaped criminals reform by interacting with nice folks" and created a wholly different narrative. There's no sense in which, say, De Niro plays the Bogart role. The two films are barely related. And indeed WNA '89 doesn't credit the original up front, burying a "suggested by" deep in the end credits. That's accurate.)