WE’RE NO ANGELS puts the unlikely combo of Humphrey Bogart, Aldo Ray and Peter Ustinov into a droll and leisurely 1955 farce directed by Michael Curtiz. Obviously stagy and at 106 minutes overlong by a good fifteen the low-keyed bemusement came out of French playwright Albert Husson’s La Cuisine des Anges, presented in 1952, migrating to Broadway a year later as My Three Angels. Ranald MacDougall (Mildred Pierce, Queen Bee, Cleopatra) adapted the script.

Three cons escape from Devil’s Island and end up in French Guiana’s capital Cayenne. Skilled thief and forger ‘Joseph’ (Bogart), murderer ‘Albert’ (Ray) and safecracker & killer ‘Jules’ (Ustinov), accompanied by Albert’s pet viper ‘Adolfe’, plan to flee further & farther on a ship headed back to France. But first they scheme to snag duds, baubles and francs by ‘working’ at a store, ostensibly to fix its leaky roof while really robbing the place blind. At first they fool the clueless storekeeper, his mindful wife and starry daughter, then they befriend them, especially when the arrogant owner and his vapid nephew arrive, malice in mind. And it’s almost Christmas…

Joan Bennett plays the wife, Leo G. Carroll the amiable fuddy duddy husband, Gloria Talbott the romance-yearning daughter. Basil Rathbone wields his rapier sneer as the nasty ‘Andre Tochard.’  The casual pace is an issue, it takes longer to get going than it ought to (trimming needed) and the interplay between Bennett, Carroll and Talbott is mostly flat filler.

But the three leads mesh delightfully and their timing with both deadpan observations and physical gags is deft: you sense they’re having a good time and you’re drawn in. It’s nice to see Bogart in one of his few lighthearted roles, likewise burly bruiser Ray and Ustinov keeps his tone at just the right register level with them so as not to overly mug things up. The final scene wins a satisfying smile. *

A gross of $8,600,000 placed 35th for the year, easily covering the production cost of $1,685,000. With John Baer and John Smith. Remade in 1989.

*  Hungarian tyro Curtiz and testy Bogie had dealt with each other’s respective attitudes three times before in Angels With Dirty Faces, Casablanca and Passage To Marseilles. Bogart had two other pictures that year, the mediocre The Left Hand Of God which was more lucrative at the tills, and the superior crime suspenser The Desperate Hours, where he went back to bad guy territory with the  vengeance. He did Bennett, 45, a solid by getting her the role in this: she’d been ostracized after a scandal involving her husband and her agent (see review of Riot In Cell Block 11). Ray scored a key role in Battle Cry, 55’s third biggest hit, Ustinov was in the intriguing Lola Montes . Talbot, 24, was getting pushed, appearing in Crashout, Lucy Gallant and All That Heaven Allows but A-listing wasn’t in the cards; she later gained cult ‘n’ camp regard as a ‘Scream Queen’ for The Cyclops, The Daughter Of Dr. Jekyll, I Married A Monster From Outer Space, Girls Town and The Leech Woman.