Humphrey Bogart and Michael Curtiz reunited 13 years after Casablanca for a Christmas-time comedy.  Based on the stage play My Three Angels, the film We’re No Angels tells the tale of three escaped convicts who help a merchant and his family in a French coastal town at the Christmas season (or more aptly saison de noël).

Joining Bogart in wearing the stripes are Aldo Ray and Peter Ustinov.  Leo G. Carroll and Joan Bennett play the merchant and his wife, while Basil Rathbone is his oiliest as an unscrupulous relative.  This movie has it all: romance, intrigue, and humor.

Wisely, neither Curtiz nor screenwriter Ranald MacDougall tried to “open up” the play too much.  The movie hews closely to the source material and is set largely in the merchant’s store.  In this holiday-themed morality tale, the convicts are more moral than the “upstanding” citizens.  The family and the convicts come to realize this.  In its own way, it has a “happily ever after” ending, or at least an ending of just desserts.

Bogart was not known for his comedies. But he is wonderfully wry in this movie.  Paired with Sabrina, this makes one wonder what his career might have been had he lived longer. He certainly could have slipped easily into character parts in both dramas and comedies.