A Devil's Island Christmas

 

We're No Angels (1955) a Holiday Evergreen

A nice seasonal offering. I campus-played it not many years ago and the students liked it. Bogartians ignore or renounce We're No Angels as a stagy and unworthy thing done toward the end, but I'll bet he enjoyed the job better than most during the 50's. Bogart learned from The African Queen that an untapped audience, broader than he’d known before, was there and waiting to watch him work, given format beyond crime or dark topic. His casting in Sabrina was enabled by Queen, plus an Academy Award that proposed him for broader things. The 50’s may be where Bogart captured his widest popular audience, as in no one need be nervous going to see him. Was return to perceived type in The Desperate Hours a welcome one? Based on remarks he made at the time, Bogart suspected not. We’re No Angels is him settling comfortably into comedy, a garden I envision Bogart tilling often had fate been kinder (plan for he and Bacall to do what became Top Secret Affair … there were even costume tests). We’re No Angels dresses Bogart and fellow angels (Peter Ustinov, Aldo Ray) in more/less pajamas, or attire as lounge-fitting. There is little outdoor work, virtually everything interior and dialogue-driven. It must have seemed to Bogie like being back on Broadway, minus the night work.

His part is that of benign crook, a role assumed over and again for radio guest sketches and personal apps. In fact, Bogart had played hoodlums, if at all, for comedy since the war (even at eve of conflict, All Through The Night), entertaining troops, though limited there as what could he do but parody the tough persona? There was TV opposite Jack Benny, the trench coat again to comic effect. Was it harder taking The Desperate Hours serious for his spoofing bad men so long? "Maybe I'm getting too old to play a hoodlum," was Bogart's answer to that film's tepid response from critics and public ($1.6 million in domestic rentals, well below what 50’s Bogart had been realizing). Anybody’s Christmas movie tended to become their best-remembered movie, J. Stewart with It’s A Wonderful Life, Crosby and White Christmas. Barbara Stanwyck said late in life that fan letters she received were mostly about Christmas In Connecticut. We're No Angels being plugged into TCM holiday schedule ties it closer to Yule ornaments, a cheery gift to unwrap each year. Better still is how We're No Angels looks, wide and lush color-rendered as 1955 saw it. Appearance of movies, as of people, is everything.

We're No Angels had played legit as My Three Angels (1953-54) to 344 performances, where Walter Slezak had Bogart's part, Jerome Cowan and Darren McGavin in the Ustinov/Ray spots. Plays were still a safest source for ready-made properties, this one needing little for translate to movies. Paramount spent but $1.6 million to accomplish that. Bogart would probably have been paid around $200K for his end, or a percentage to assure at least that. He was relaxed and adept with the comedy, a good teammate to Ustinov and Aldo Ray. We're No Angels gets a mid-point goose when Basil Rathbone enters the fray as a Scrooge-like relation who's a threat to sympathetic Leo G. Carroll and Joan Bennett. The three Angel's disposal of villainy was surely negotiated in minute detail with Code watchers, as it comes close to getting away with murder --- in fact, two murders. We're No Angels brought $2.7 million in domestic rentals to Paramount, that plus reasonable foreign income would have put it in profit. There were two NBC network runs, the first on 12/9/64, these good for $200 or so K. The show now streams off several platforms in HD and looks like a million. There is also a Blu-Ray recently released.