Talk about rigid staginess, "We're No Angels" is a crime comedy but it is so darn flat that it almost evaporates from the screen once it is over. That is saying a lot for a movie starring Humphrey Bogart.
It is Christmas time and three convicts have escaped from Devil's Island and they are about as charming a group as you can imagine. There is Joseph, the charming thief (Humphrey Bogart); Albert, a killer who has a predilection for getting any woman he can (Aldo Ray), and Jules, a clever thief who can break into any safe just by caressing it (he had also killed his wife and is played by Peter Ustinov). These three enter a shop that sells clothing and various other items and knick-knacks and volunteer to help Felix Ducotel (Leo G. Carroll), who runs the store, fix a leaking roof. Meanwhile, some shenanigans develop between the owner's wife (a thankless role by Joan Bennett) and their pretty young daughter (Gloria Talbott) who faints about three times before she's even properly introduced to these men. The convicts were planning all along to rob the store blind but they start to change their ways because, you know, it is Christmas and they fix the meal and clean the dishes.
"We're No Angels" takes an eternity before the pace picks up and it does briefly with the introduction of the colorful, mean-spirited store owner (Basil Rathbone), an incorrigible prick who thinks money is the only value in life. Rathbone elevates the proceedings yet the movie never veers from its stage origins. I did like the running gag that everybody in Cayenne, a French colonial town, knows that the escaped convicts are at this store and nobody flinches at the sight of them or calls the police (until the end of the film). There is also an unseen poisonous snake belonging to Albert that results in a couple of unseen deaths. I could have lived without the halos.
