我们不是天使 We're No Angels(1955)
简介：
- 约瑟夫、朱丽丝和阿尔伯特从恶魔岛的监狱里逃跑出来，他们在一个港口闲荡，等着一条船来把他们载走，在这期间，他们决定从一家商店里偷一些东西出来，以便在路上使用，于是，他们想方设法让那个店主聘请他们去为他修理屋顶。在屋顶上，他们就能窥见这一家人的生活了，然后再找到机会下手行窃。依莎贝尔是这个家庭中的一个女儿，今年刚满十八岁，还没有出嫁，而且她正在渴望她的旧日情人保尔，保尔这时已去巴黎。依莎贝尔的父亲菲利科斯很害怕他的表兄安德烈抢占他的商店。过了一段时间，保尔和安德烈一起回到了这个岛上，他们并没有受到欢迎。而那三个修理屋顶的窃贼还未找到下手的时机……
演员：
影评：
Not to asperse the gladsome Christmas vibes, but Michael Curtiz’s Bogart star vehicle WE’RE NO ANGELS is such a plodding pipsqueak dwarfed in front of their canonized work of CASABLANCA (1942). The comparison might not be fair as the two movies belong to tonally disparate genres, but the sticking point is that Bogart is anything but a top-line comedian, and the picture’s lavish Technicolor and VistaVision treatments only make him look out of sorts, why he looks so dismally gray and grimy, standing side by side with a rough-hewn Aldo Ray and a rubicund Peter Ustinov?
3 escaped convicts from Devil’s Island, French Guiana, fetching up in a nearby colonial town right before Christmas, intend to rob a store managed by the Ducotel family. However, impressed by the household’s impeccable goodness, they are, instead, very much obliging in solving their problems, from financial snags, familial inheritance to a damsel’s suitor. During the process, unregenerate antagonists are effortlessly disposed of (offscreen by their poisonous pet snake called Adolphe), and in the end of the day, those three non-angels even reckon that prison might be a better place than a free world at large, facetiously decide to go back in incarceration, which also jocosely suggests their prison-springing outing can be fêted as an annual thing to spread goodwill and merriment.
That said, the whole picture is seminally crippled by its ponderous pace and slapdash, even languid execution of the directorial guidance, often the story plays out with the clunkiest line-delivery uttered by thinly-developed, black-or-white characters, twinned with hugger-mugger spatial mobility, even festive strains are supplanted by the melancholic rendition of Sentimental Moments, sung by Joan Bennett’s materfamilias, arguably the most all-round role in the fold, albeit still a stock mother figure.
Among the three leads, our saving grace is Ustinov, preferably arch and has a knack of gingering up the rote plot with his own conspiratorial expressions and small gesticulations, like his Jules’ safecracking legerdemain, seeing is believing!
Anyhow, WE’RE NO ANGELS is a storybook bonhomie-preaching fantasy that seems only opportune in the holiday season, other than that, one’s inherent low quotient of sufferance might significantly ruin that willingness.
referential entries: Curtiz’s WHITE CHRISTMAS (1954, 6.7/10); CASABLANCA (1942, 8.9/10).
三个越狱逃犯在平安夜降临到港口商店店主家，本想杀人劫财以买船票逃离恶魔岛的他们，却被店主一家的真善美所打动。尽管他们满口“敲头、挖眼、割喉”虎狼之词，接下来“洗完盘子就干”让他们的伪恶魔形象瞬间垮掉。尽管他们一口咬定“我们不是天使”，却履行着伸张正义、惩恶扬善的益举。“屋顶修好了吗？”“一切都修好了。”而在一切都修好之后，他们决定返回监狱，因为“那里会遇到更好的人”。监狱里的不都是恶魔，锦衣下也不全是天使，无疑是对司法腐败的讽刺，而这种讽刺在三个逃犯模拟法庭审判时达到高潮。而在这样的黑暗世界中，我们的天使也可以是这样的一反常规的形象：手里有蛇，头顶有光。
