“The formula of Beat the Devil,” its director, John Huston, once remarked, “is that everyone is slightly absurd.” The plot of the picture was unknown to the cast, but presumably known to Huston and his co-writer, Truman Capote; however, Capote later remarked that he had “a suspicion that John wasn’t too clear about it.” Commercially speaking, the movie courted—and achieved—disaster. According to most accounts, Capote wrote the script as they went along (reading it aloud to the cast each morning, Robert Morley says), and Huston didn’t show any signs of anxiety. This improvisation was not necessarily an actor’s delight, and Humphrey Bogart, who looks rather bewildered through much of it, as if he hadn’t been let in on the joke, said, “Only the phonies think it’s funny. It’s a mess.” Yes, but it may be the funniest mess of all time. It kidded itself, yet it succeeded in some original (and perhaps dangerously marginal) way by finding a style of its own.

"Beat the Devil" went straight from box office flop to cult classic and has been called the first camp movie, although Bogart, who sank his own money into it, said, "Only phonies like it." It's a movie that was made up on the spot; Huston tore up the original screenplay on the first day of filming, flew the young Truman Capote to Ravallo, Italy, to crank out new scenes against a daily deadline and allowed his supporting stars, especially Robert Morley and Peter Lorre, to create dialogue for their own characters. (Capote spoke daily by telephone with his pet raven, and one day when the raven refused to answer he flew to Rome to console it, further delaying the production.)