As reported here, Marie Galante is a French girl working with the French telegram public agency who, after suffering several mishaps, "ends up singing in a café in the Panama Canal Zone". She soon gets involved in a plot to destroy the canal, a ship or a fleet. «Marie Galante» was based on a best-selling novel by Jacques Duval published in 1931, but when the screenwriters adapted it to cinema they "fumigated" the story and almost canonized Marie. In the original Marie Basilide is a poor girl from Bordeaux that is kidnapped and abandoned in Venezuela, and who finally arrives in Panama where she prostitutes to achieve her goal of returning home. It was a mixture of espionage and sex, and a reflection on French colonialism, referring to the Panama Canal. The movie is anything but that, maybe espionage and a little of prudish sex, but no more. Referring to the synopsis, what caught my attention most was the phrase "café in the Panama Canal Zone". Was this kind of place existent in the Canal Zone? I do not have the answer and I have no idea what the Zonians would do to have fun at night outside the barracks or homes in the military forts. I know that the city of Panamá once had fancy cabarets, where famous artists performed, where Evita Perón sang and where soldiers and marines used to go. But I never heard of cafes or bars strictly speaking within the militarized Canal Zone. In my youth, if I ever went to anything remotely similar, it was a big wood yacht club on the banks of the canal, where bands of American soldiers and Panamanians played rock and roll. In any case, returning to «Marie Galante», the film was not as successful as expected, though it is entertaining enough, and director Henry King maintained the interest with discretion, without becoming a "great espionage opus". Nevertheless, that did not prevent that a theatrical producer urged Deval to turn it into a musical the year the film was released. To that end, the producer hired none other than Kurt Weill, the master composer who collaborated with playwright Bertolt Brecht, and author of the song «Mack the Knife». But the frivolous Deval did not take the job seriously, he went to the United States to have fun and did not really adapt his novel to the stage, but directly transferred fragments of dialogue from the novel to the musical libretto, with many sets to make any set designer crazy, including a port with moving ships. The musical did not last a month in the theater. Efforts were made in 2009 to resurrect it and it was staged in Rome and New York. In the movies, the novel had better luck, when a new (unacredited) version was made by Fox in 1940, for the Charlie Chan series: the quite appreciable «Charlie Chan in Panama» in which Sidney Toler was by far more entertaining and astute than Spencer Tracy in «Marie Galante», as the investigator who uncovers a plot to destroy the Panama Canal.
