Trivia / Beat the Devil

• Completely Different Title: In Sweden, the film was called "Skälmarnas marknad", meaning roughly "The Market of the Rogues".
• Creator Backlash: Humphrey Bogart reportedly disliked the film, perhaps because he lost a good deal of his own money bankrolling it.
• Production Posse: This was the final collaboration between John Huston and Humphrey Bogart.
• Those Two Actors: This was the last of four films that Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre made together.
• Troubled Production: The film started out having its screenplay written by Claud Cockburn, the author of the novel the film was based on. However, Cockburn didn't finish the screenplay in time for the shoot, and what he had written was mostly unworkable, forcing Huston to hire Truman Capote to polish up what they could salvage from Cockburn's screenplay while writing new material during the shoot. In several cases, Capote and John Huston were literally writing new pages and handing them to the actors minutes before the cameras were due to roll. Astoundingly, the shoot otherwise wasn't overly problematic, other than some mild bickering between Huston and Humphrey Bogart...at least until Bogart was injured in a car accident, forcing Huston to resort to filming scenes with a body double and Jennifer Jones for a couple of days. Even when Bogart recovered enough to resume working, they couldn't find a decent dentist to replace the teeth Bogart had lost in the accident, forcing Huston to rely on, of all people, a young Peter Sellers to overdub some of Bogart's lines in the finished product. The finished product ended up flopping at the box-office, and Bogart — who invested a substantial amount of money into the production and lost nearly all of it — ended up blaming Huston, resulting in the two never working together again.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: The script was deemed unsatisfactory, so Truman Capote was brought in to re-write it while onset.

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