Passage to Marseille

It looks like a sure-fire winner on paper, but nothing about Passage to Marseille really clicks. Bogie's Devil's Island escapee never feels like a fully-rounded character, and Greenstreet, Lorre and Rains - Bogart's fellow stars from the same studio's Casablanca - are wasted in largely inconsequential roles. Another negative: the clumsy flashback structure plays havoc with the pacing of the story. Still watchable, but a definite misfire.

Pretty cool WWII story, told mostly through flashbacks, about French convicts led by Humphrey Bogart who escape from Devil's Island to go help their country fight the Nazis. The men are picked up by a freighter bound for home and must deal with slimy Sydney Greenstreet, who isn't particularly opposed to the idea of a Nazi-occupied France.

Reunites Casablanca costars Bogart, Rains, Lorre, and Greenstreet with director Michael Curtiz. In many ways, this could be seen as a possible sequel to Casablanca, though certainly not in that film's league. I could see where you could rework the story to be about Rick, Ilsa, and Louis' post-Casablanca story. Cute use of models in early scene where the war correspondent arrives to speak with Claude Rains. This movie is slammed a lot for its use of the flashback-within-a-flashback-within-a-flashback technique. Normally I'm not a fan of that myself but here I didn't think it was confusing like critics claim. The ending is kind of depressing but realistic. War is hell, after all.

It must be a problem for first-time viewers to watch this flashback within a flashback within a flashback film. There is also the urge to compare this with "Casablanca". It cannot hold a candle to that masterpiece. On its own, it has some good qualities. The production is first-rate. The cast do excellent work considering the limits of the cliche-ridden script. The Devil's Island sequence is particularly well executed. So we have a film that may disappoint considering the talent but is hard to dismiss.

Wartime heroics never seemed exploited in quite so complex a fashion as "Passage to Marseille," directed by Michael Curtiz…

Bogart, a French journalist framed for murder because of his political views and sent to Devil's Island during World War II, escapes from his penal hell with four other convicts and winds up on a French freighter bound for home… Hoping to rejoin the fighting Free French resistance movement, the men, all fiercely loyal patriots, become involved in preventing a takeover of the ship by Fascist sympathizers…

This relatively simple plot line is then surrounded by a series of extraneous plots and subplots which were related in a series of single, double, and even triple flashbacks, making any semblance of coherency virtually impossible…

Bogart's characterization is equally vague and complicated as he maintained an opposing balance of virtue and vice… At one moment he is the picture of idealistic moral righteousness fighting against a callous system, and the next he debased his human nature as he brutally machine-guns some defenseless enemies… His moral platitudes do not balance his immoral behavior, making for ambiguity and confusion...

The most important saving grace of "Passage to Marseille" is the supporting cast headed by Bogart's "Casablanca" co-stars Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre, who all turned in strong character portrayals

I think some people have been unduly unfair on this film.

There is quite a complex sequence of flashbacks. But as a matter of fact, I didn't find them at all difficult to follow. My brain only hurts when I try to work it out afterwards. Maybe it's another of those things which work better in a cinema than on TV.

There is a scene where Bogart's character commits a war crime. I think we have to remember that Bogart did not always play saintly characters. He was not exactly saintly in the "Maltese Falcon" or "Casablanca". He was even less saintly in "The Caine Mutiny". I am sure that the audience in 1944 would have been shocked by the war crime just as we are

now; even Nazi propaganda sometimes emphasised the importance of being gentlemanly to prisoners. The easy and boring option would have been for

Bogart to play the all-American (or all-French) hero throughout; I find it

more interesting that in this case he isn't. I think the circumstances to some extent explain what Bogart's character does. The fact is war crimes happen in war. They happened then, and they happen now, and the perpetrators are not as through-and-through evil (or different from us) as we would like to think.

I agree with those who say this film is not as good as "Casablanca" or the "Maltese Falcon". The plot is a lot more lumpy and uneven than those films. But I've seen those two films several times already, and I can't watch them every night. "Passage to Marseille" is worth at least one viewing. In fact I would like to see it again, if I get a chance.