Review: We’re No Angels (1955)

Three seedy prisoners with life sentences over their heads (Humphrey Bogart, Sir Peter Ustinov, and Aldo Ray) break out of Devil’s Island and whilst hanging around a French port, they plan to steal from a local shopkeeper (Leo G. Carroll). However, the shop’s books aren’t looking so good right now, and so the hardened crims decide to pose as handymen willing to fix the shop’s damaged roof, in exchange for Carroll and his family giving them food and lodging. They’ll get to the looting later. That’s their story at least, their melting hearts seem to suggest otherwise. Basil Rathbone turns up as Carroll’s cold-hearted cousin come to inspect the books for the shop he owns.

 

This 1955 crime-comedy from director Michael Curtiz (“The Adventures of Robin Hood”, “Casablanca”) and screenwriter Ranald MacDougall (writer of “The Mountain”, director of the underrated “The World, the Flesh, and the Devil”) is nothing stellar, but it’s an entertaining one with a fine cast. Sometimes that’s enough.

 

What I really appreciated about the film is that for most of the film’s length, the trio of escaped cons are a pretty scummy, disreputable brood. You know they’re going to be softened a bit eventually, but thuggish Aldo Ray and even Sir Peter Ustinov still look rather sleazy and filthy, and I kinda appreciated that. The element of danger/sleaze to the characters, and Ray in particular, really lifts this film. Ustinov pretty much steals the show, and relatively thin here he looks remarkably like Tom Hardy. It’s a completely unsubtle, constantly mugging performance, but a bloody good one. Although he looks disconcertingly pale, Bogey is pretty good, but for the most part he was the same in everything, wasn’t he? He gets to wear a pink apron in this one, though, so that’s different. Although he’s not as impressive here as he was in “Welcome to Hard Times”, Aldo Ray is perfectly fine, rounding out the trio as a tattooed thug with a soft spot for the fairer sex.

 

Outside of the central trio we have appearances by two of cinema’s finest ever character actors, Leo G. Carroll and Basil Rathbone. Carroll is in fine form as one of the few likeable characters in the film, whilst Rathbone plays such a stingy bastard that even Scrooge thinks he’s a heartless bastard. Playing a most discourteous, snooty and cranky part is definitely in Rathbone’s wheelhouse- he’s terrific. As the good-hearted counter to Rathbone, Carroll, is solid as ever, and gets the film’s best line when finding out that someone has died in their sleep: ‘That was very considerate of him’. Also funny, by the way, is the scene where our central trio are trying and failing to get anyone to ‘find’ a certain dead body. The funniest scene, however, is when the trio decide that they will alert a certain someone’s attention to a certain poisonous animal in their bedroom…and slowly get around to doing so. Very, very slowly.

 

Although this is the least French-sounding group of characters for a film set in France you’ll likely ever see, the stars here are great fun, and the film is easy, breezy, and amusing. Good-looking, too.

 

Rating: B-