Not to asperse the gladsome Christmas vibes, but Michael Curtiz’s Bogart star vehicle WE’RE NO ANGELS is such a plodding pipsqueak dwarfed in front of their canonized work of CASABLANCA (1942). The comparison might not be fair as the two movies belong to tonally disparate genres, but the sticking point is that Bogart is anything but a top-line comedian, and the picture’s lavish Technicolor and VistaVision treatments only make him look out of sorts, why he looks so dismally gray and grimy, standing side by side with a rough-hewn Aldo Ray and a rubicund Peter Ustinov?
3 escaped convicts from Devil’s Island, French Guiana, fetching up in a nearby colonial town right before Christmas, intend to rob a store managed by the Ducotel family. However, impressed by the household’s impeccable goodness, they are, instead, very much obliging in solving their problems, from financial snags, familial inheritance to a damsel’s suitor. During the process, unregenerate antagonists are effortlessly disposed of (offscreen by their poisonous pet snake called Adolphe), and in the end of the day, those three non-angels even reckon that prison might be a better place than a free world at large, facetiously decide to go back in incarceration, which also jocosely suggests their prison-springing outing can be fêted as an annual thing to spread goodwill and merriment.
That said, the whole picture is seminally crippled by its ponderous pace and slapdash, even languid execution of the directorial guidance, often the story plays out with the clunkiest line-delivery uttered by thinly-developed, black-or-white characters, twinned with hugger-mugger spatial mobility, even festive strains are supplanted by the melancholic rendition of Sentimental Moments, sung by Joan Bennett’s materfamilias, arguably the most all-round role in the fold, albeit still a stock mother figure.
Among the three leads, our saving grace is Ustinov, preferably arch and has a knack of gingering up the rote plot with his own conspiratorial expressions and small gesticulations, like his Jules’ safecracking legerdemain, seeing is believing!
Anyhow, WE’RE NO ANGELS is a storybook bonhomie-preaching fantasy that seems only opportune in the holiday season, other than that, one’s inherent low quotient of sufferance might significantly ruin that willingness.
referential entries: Curtiz’s WHITE CHRISTMAS (1954, 6.7/10); CASABLANCA (1942, 8.9/10).