We're No Angels (Paramount, 1955)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next film on TCM’s Christmas-themed schedule – they’re showing Christmas movies continually until the day itself – was We’re No Angels, made at Paramount in 1955 and Humphrey Bogart’s fourth-from-last film. When he made it he had three more to go – The Left Hand of God (a drama instead of a comedy but strikingly similar to this one; in We’re No Angels he plays the leader of an escaped trio of convicts from the notorious Devil’s Island prison on Cayenne in the French Caribbean who helps a storeowner and his family get back on their feet, and in The Left Hand of God he plays a military officer who escapes from the war camp of a Chinese warlord and poses as a priest), The Desperate Hours and The Harder They Fall – and what surprised me about this film more than anything else is how good Bogart looked health-wise. In Beat the Devil, made two years earlier, Bogart had looked like death warmed over and it seemed as if he was already ill with the esophageal cancer that would kill him in 1957, but here he looked surprisingly hale, hearty and even a bit overweight. The film began life as a French comedy called La Cuisine des Anges (“Food of the Angels”) by Albert Husson. Kiss Me, Kate authors Sam and Bella Spewack later adapted it into an English-language play called We’re No Angels and Ranald MacDougall turned it into the screenplay for this film.

The movie was directed by Michael Curtiz, Hungarian expat who’d already worked with Bogart on six previous films, including the classic Casablanca, and the three titular non-angels are Joseph (Bogart), Jules (Peter Ustinov) and Albert (Aldo Ray, who’s not only appealingly hunky but surprisingly good as a farceur). On their way from Devil’s Island – where the sight of convicts on work furlough is apparently common enough that their prison garb doesn’t instantly give them away as escapees – they break into a store managed by Felix Ducotel (Leo G. Carroll, engagingly droll as usual), his wife Amélie (Joan Bennett, whom Bogart got the role after she’d been blacklisted for four years following the scandal in which her husband, producer Walter Wanger, was arrested for the attempted murder of her agent, Jennings Lang, because Wanger thought Bennett and Lang were having an affair) and their daughter Isabelle (Gloria Talbott). Unfortunately, the store is part of an international conglomerate owned by Felix’s cousin André Trochard (Basil Rathbone, the real villain of the piece), who’s coming to investigate and check out the store’s books, with the understanding that he’ll fire and dispossess the Ducotels once he finds out how wretchedly the store is doing. Joseph, who was arrested and sent to Devil’s Island in the first place for financial crimes (the other two were both murderers), determines to fix the books so the store will look sensationally successful, and he uses his skills as a con artist to sell merchandise to unsuspecting customers so the store finally has an income. André makes it off the ship in Cayenne harbor – the one on which the three non-angels were hoping to stow away and make their way back to Paris – despite a quarantine announced by the ship’s doctor (hunky young John Smith), and immediately grabs the store’s books before Joseph has had a chance to alter them. Fortunately, he’s quickly dispatched by Adolphe, the pet viper kept by Albert in a little wicker box.

André’s sudden death leaves his fortune to his son Paul (John Baer), whom Isabelle Ducotel had a crush on, but André had already arranged a dynastic marriage between Paul and the daughter of a major French shipowner whose vessels André wanted access to for his business. Joseph forges a will leaving half André’s fortune to Paul and half to Felix Ducotel, but Paul – who turns out to be just as much of an S.O.B. as his dad – burns the will so he can grab the fortune for himself. It turns out that Adolphe never returned to his cage after dispatching André, so the snake ex machina takes out Paul as well and therefore the Ducotels end up with André’s entire fortune. The three non-angels dress in normal street clothes for the ship that will take them back to France – the first time all movie we’ve seen them in anything other than prison garb – but at the last minute they decide to turn themselves in and return to Devil’s Island, and as they head back there animated haloes appear over the heads of the three convicts as well as above Adolphe’s cage. We’re No Angels is a quite charming film, and Rathbone’s villain performance is easily the most despicable in the movie; though Bogart is still playing a crook, he’s a droll one and quite sympathetic. It’s also welcome as one of only five films Bogart ever made in color; the others were The African Queen, The Barefoot Contessa, The Caine Mutiny and The Left Hand of God. And no sooner was it over that I dug out my old DVD copy of the 1938 film The Adventures of Robin Hood and replayed the May 30, 1938 promotional broadcast featuring Basil Rathbone (who played the principal villain, Sir Guy of Gisbourne, in that movie too) narrating a half-hour précis of Erich Wolfgang Korngold conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra in highlights from that film’s amazing (and Academy Award-winning) score, which was truly fun to listen to after Rathbone’s authoritative slimeball in We’re No Angels!