Based on a minor, early (1897) play by George Bernard Shaw, and co-produced by the production companies of Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, the major pleasures of the 1959 movie "The Devil's Disciple" are the irony-saturated lines Laurence Olivier delivered to maximum effect through mostly curled lips. He played the British commander "Gentleman Johnny" Burgoyne. The play takes place a few weeks before the defeat by a much larger American army at Saratoga in 1777 and Burgoyne's surrender. Shaw has the general very aware that his situation was very perilous and who was to blame for not ensuring sufficient troops. His Col. Blimp-lilke foil, the doltish Major Swindon, played with sadistic incomprehension by Harry Andrews, cannot conceive of defeat and is almos as successful at alienating the locals as the bright lights of the American occupiers documenting their games of humiliating prisoners in the Abu Grhaib prison.

The Hollywood stars who undertook the project (filmed in England) play Americans. The top-billed Lancaster plays a Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Anthony Anderson, a kind-hearted, well-established minister not very much like Elmer Gantry, the charlatan preacher he would play the following year and pick up an Oscar for portraying.

The lovable charlatan in "The Devil's Disciple" — indeed, the title character — is Dick Dudgeon, a notorious wastrel who returns to his birthplace and snatches his father's corpse from the gallows, where he has been (mistakenly) hanged as a rebel. The Rev. Anderson buries his parishioner and is harboring Dick who a British patrol mistakes for the minister and arrests (for burying Dick's father).

This blundering leads to a trial in which Dudgeon and Burgoyne entertain each other at Major Swindon's expense. It also leads the Rev. Anderson to get involved in a battle and to turn its tide, though all he wanted to do was get a leading citizen of the commonwealth (of Massachusetts) to intercede for Dick Dudgeon.

Lancaster has the action scenes (centering on a burning log, a swarm of British soldiers, and an ammunition dump), but no particularly good lines. It being Shaw, the character who is avowedly a disciple of the devil's is going to get better lines than a servant of the Christian Good Lord, especially if the devil's disciple is mistaken for the shepherd of docile, loyal British subjects. The scoundrel shows bravery and compassion, but so does the heretofore conventional minister, and the foppish general, and the minister's heretofore conventional wife. I don't know why Shaw allocated no good lines at all to the female parts. Mrs. Judith Anderson has a large parts (onscreen more than Gen. Burgoyne) but a very unmemorable one as played by Janette Scott (an actress I only recognize from being mentioned in a line rhyming with "hot" in "Late-night double feature picture-show"; she's tepid or less herein). Eva La Gallienne as Dick's resentful mother bristles and curses him memorably, but arrives late and disappears quickly — in a movie that only runs 83 minutes, some of which are spent with mapping troop movements with animated toy soldiers and wry voice-over narration.

The history is unreliable, but the proceedings are entertaining, particularly Olivier (who in retrospect seems to have been warming up for his role in "Spartacus," also produced by Douglas's company) toying with Tony Curtis. Dick is a match in gentlemanliness for "Gentleman Johnny" and their discussion of why it is better to hang Dick as a traitor than have a firing squad execute him as a prisoner of war is the very Shavian highlight of the movie.




Recommended:
Yes

Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older