When a topnotch director, a novelist with a sense of humor, and a bunch of witty actors meet on the Italian Riviera, the result can be a good time. When the director is John Huston, the writer Truman Capote, and when the actors include Bogart, Lorre and Lollobrigida, the result was Beat the Devil, and it is a very good time.

The movie was made on vacation as well as location, and this shows, much to the film's advantage. The plot is a crazy hopscotch around the Mediterranean, with side-jumps into subplots that pull up short in dead ends. The picture begins with a DeSica-like village square scene--a cacaphonous little brass band and a crowd through which are led four caricature desperadoes in handcuffs. They are Bogie's conspirators in an African uranium swindle. The movie flashes back to explain the scene. The explanation is the movie proper. It involves the characters in a voyage on a terrifically dilapidated steamer, a ride in a car with a built-in champagne bucket, and a tangle with a band of surly Arabs whose chief is lovesick over photographs of Rita Hayworth. A prim young Englishman's wife (Jennifer Jones) is snowed by the inscrutable Bogart, and Bogie's wife (Lollobrigida) is similarly attracted to the Britisher. The swindle plan nears success a dozen times, but falls apart each time. At the end the same shot of the square appears, and the film closes in a boisterous da capo.

Since the whole thing is a farce, the actors are at their funniest when they parody their own box-office personalities. Bogart attempts a dashing and impossible escape from the Arabs, and his nonsense bravado is great. Lorre, playing a dubious character named Julius O'Hara, intrigues around wonderfully. Lollobrigida is a moody and bosomy Italian who faints often. Robert Morley and the other two con men are in the style of henchmen in The Ladykillers.

The dialogue is many notches above most comedy material, and full of little declamations perhaps characteristic of a novelist on vacation. The crook Lorre says, "Time. Squandered by Italians. Disbelieved by the English. Dallied with by the French. Changed to dollars by Americans. I think Time is a crook."

Huston's direction is real artistry. The Italian scenes were all shot in that vibrant natural light Huston manages to record. Every shot is composed with the care and sense of proportion found in a good salon still. The film as a whole is a good-natured and beautifully turned-out joke, a string of very funny, often non-sequitur, sequences.

If Huston and his troupe hoped to pull a joke on their old faithful audiences, the joke falls somewhere else, because Beat The Devil is better than any stock article.