Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

I’ve been putting off watching this oddity for a long time because I didn’t feel that a comedy would play to the strengths of either director John Huston or star Humphrey Bogart, especially a comedy which has the reputation of being self-indulgent.  Co-writers Huston and Truman Capote apparently intended it as a spoof of ‘The Maltese Falcon’.  Since it doesn't obviously take aim at film noir tropes, t he only connection I could see to the earlier Huston film is the presence of Bogart and of Peter Lorre, and that the character played here by Robert Morley bears some resemblance to that played by Sydney Greenstreet. OK, let’s try to summarise the plot, such as it is. Morley is in charge of a disparate gang of misfits who have developed a scheme to make a fortune from mining uranium in Africa, and Bogart is helping them to acquire the land they need on the cheap. Whilst waiting in an Italian port for a ship to take them to the dark continent they get to know Mr and Mrs Chelm, a ...

In 1951 director John Huston scored a big hit with ‘The African Queen’, and it seems like a few years later someone, maybe Huston himself, had the bright idea of trying to repeat a winning formula. Instead of Africa in World War I we are somewhere in the Pacific in World War II, and instead of Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart as the mismatched companions we have Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum. He’s Mr Allison, a US Marine who gets washed up on a tiny atoll which has just the one inhabitant, a nun, Sister Angela, who herself has only been there a few days. Surprisingly they hit it off straightaway so any dramatic tension comes from whether they can avoid the Japanese who arrive shortly afterwards, and whether their relationship will develop romantically. I was less interested in the former, so that a long and rather unbelievable sequence in which Allison tries to steal food from the Japanese camp struck me as a misstep. Deborah Kerr, even though she has to put on an Irish accent, ...